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Information Technology News Do not buy our AntiVirus application, Trend Micro man advises
Information Technology News Do not buy our AntiVirus application, Trend Micro man advises | Do not buy our AntiVirus application, Trend Micro man advises |
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| by Davey Winder | |
| Thursday, 25 September 2008 | |
  
Last week I was having breakfast in Madrid with, amongst others, Con Mallon who just so happens to be the Director of Regional Product Marketing with the Symantec Consumer Business Unit. Featured Whitepaper
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I got the usual answer, which I have heard before many times from many different security vendors: "the market demands it." Apparently there are still enough consumers who want to mix and match, to build their own Internet Security Suite. This despite the fact that products from different vendors are notorious for not working well together, often preventing installation of competing products in the first place for that matter. Of course, Con did not have sales figures to hand to illustrate just how many people opt for the slightly cheaper, lot less secure, standalone antivirus product. Again, that is typical of the response from security vendors it has to be said. So it was very refreshing to read of one security vendor executive, the top malware specialist with Trend Micro, telling it like it is for once. Apparently, while at a press lunch in Sydney, Raimund Genes let slip with a delightfully honest response to a question about the competition in the standalone antivirus market. He started off by claiming such applications were only really of use to knowledgeable 'security geeks.' But he then went on to suggest that "Just buying an antivirus because it is $10 cheaper lowers [the user's] level of security but they think they are secure..." I can only assume that someone had spiked the sherry trifle with some truth drug or other, as the same report claims a member of Trend Micro's consumer team agreed, and said "I would rather nobody bought standalone antivirus. We are trying to re-educate the market." Perhaps slightly less controversial were comments from Genes that blacklist-based malware protection is on borrowed time, wit a couple of years left to live at the most. Which would explain why the latest Kaspersky Internet Suite and the new Norton Internet Security Suite 2009, as already reported here, adopts a whitelisting rather than blacklisting approach to protection which speeds up scans and lowers system resource usage. |
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