[LINK] Web malware a 'loosing battle'

[Alastair Rankine]

stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
> Malware flood driving new AV 
>
> Symantec researchers say number of malicious applications is rapidly 
> outpacing the volume of legitimate programs, forcing a rethink of  AV 
> defense tactics  By Matt Hines. December 14, 2007 
>   

As Coding Horror recently pointed out, AV software is basically a fancy 
blacklist, and blacklists just don't work. Detection rates are currently 
somewhere between 33% and 80% for recently-discovered exploits, see:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001009.html

I'd love to see figures on the false positive rate too. Wasn't there a 
case recently where a Symatec AV product got a false positive hit on 
itself? With a bit of data and Bayes' theorem it would become apparent 
just how useless AV software is.

To me, the Infoworld article reads like Symatec trying to justify the 
pathetic performance of their software by pointing the finger elsewhere 
instead of at their deeply flawed attempt at a solution.

I only have one Windows box these days but I've been running it without 
AV software for ages. Any tech-savvy person (including all Linkers) 
should be doing this same IMHO.