Experts say that soon the antivirus program will become useless.
The era of the antivirus software may fail. Security experts say that today these tools become more and more ineffective. In addition, anti-virus software for its operation requires high rights, making them dangerous for computers.
The Department of homeland security (CERT) recently issued a warning about a popular antivirus from Symantec. Your institution document published after the experts of Google project Zero has discovered a critical vulnerability in this product. If an attacker will use found holes, then it may hijack your PC.
“Worse, these vulnerabilities still need to look for. They do not require from users some action, they affect the setting software runs with the highest access rights,” says Google researcher TEVIS ormandi.
This is not the first time anti-viruses make the computer vulnerable. Professor, Concordia University Mohammad Manana, who is engaged in research in the field of it security, recently published the results of a study of antivirus software and software for parental control. Among the studied products — AVG, Kaspersky and BitDefender. Many of these developments bypass the security features of Internet browsers in order to have the ability to scan encrypted connections for potential threats.
“We were surprised at how poor they were, — said the expert. Some of them do not give security in any way.”
At Kaspersky Lab about the research, Mann said that they study this work. AVG said it already made the necessary changes in their software.
Many experts agree that the antivirus software cannot work well enough to protect your PC from modern threats.
“Today, antiviruses are becoming more and more useless,” writes in his blog CEO on cyber security KnowBe4 STU Sjouwerman. — The bad guys are smarter and they are not going to bypass the antiviruses. They just will attack through the weakest link in it security — the users themselves”.
Increasingly, such attacks focused on social engineering or phishing. They lure users to infected web sites where you can steal information or demand money. These websites are in a very short time, and antivirus software often fails to update to be able to recognize them, says Silverman.
CEO of cybersecurity firm eSentire Paul Haynes says that the antivirus software was developed to protect 80 to 90 percent of all threats. But now it is able to protect from less than 10 percent using the new tactics of cybercriminals.
“Every day, every week and every month the situation is getting worse,” said Haines.
However, Superman, and Haynes believe that even a small level of protection offered by antivirus programs is important for corporations.
“It’s the easiest and cheapest way to confront the threats,” said Haines.
