Fergie's Tech Blog

Eighty Percent of New Malware Defeats Antivirus

Munir Kotadia writes on ZDNet Australia:

The most popular antivirus applications on the market are rendered useless by around 80 percent of new malware, according to AusCERT.

At a security breakfast hosted by e-mail security firm Messagelabs in Sydney on Wednesday, the general manager of the Australian Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT), Graham Ingram, told the audience that popular desktop antivirus applications "don't work".

"At the point we see it as a CERT, which is very early on -- the most popular brands of antivirus on the market … have an 80 percent miss rate. That is not a detection rate that is a miss rate.

"So if you are running these pieces of software, eight out of 10 pieces of malicious code are going to get in," said Ingram.

Ingram, who refused to name any specific companies, was quick to point that this was due to cybercriminals designing their Trojans and viruses to bypass detection rather than a defective product.

posted by Fergie @ 7/19/2006 11:14:00 AM