Robert McMillan from Wired recently published an article about the necessity of Antivirus Software in light of the ever changing and more sophisticated threat landscape. Here is an excerpt from the article and if you would like to read the whole thing (you should) click here.
"Dan Guido, the CEO of security startup Trail of Bits also doesn’t use AV. Some security pros use it because they’re in regulated industries, or because they work with customers who require it. “If it weren’t for that,” he says, “almost nobody in the security industry would run it.”
It’s a story we heard again and again at RSA this week. The pros are generally smart enough to avoid the things that will get them hacked — visiting malicious websites or opening documents from untrusted sources. But even if they get fooled, the odds are their antivirus software catching it are pretty low. But many of these pros also believe that antivirus isn’t always that useful to the average business either.
“Ten years ago if you were to ask someone the question, ‘Do you need antivirus?’ the overwhelming response would be, ‘Absolutely, my entire security strategy is based on endpoint antivirus,’” says Paul Carugati, a security architect with Motorola Solutions. “Today … I don’t want to downplay the need for it, but it has certainly lost its effectiveness.”
The problem is that most criminals are smart enough to test their attacks against popular antivirus products. There’s even a free website called Virus Total that lets you see whether any of the most popular malware scanning engines will spot your Trojan program or virus. So when new attacks pop up on the internet, it’s common for them to completely evade antivirus detection."
