Do not buy our AntiVirus application, Trend Micro man advises

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 24 September 2008 23:09

Your IT - Home IT

It has been a source of bemusement for those in the IT security business for years: just why do security vendors continue to flog standalone antivirus solutions? Now a security vendor's own security expert has gone on record to state standalone offerings provide a false sense of security, and includes his own application amongst the offenders.

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.

Symantec had just launched the new Norton Internet Security Suite 2009 product the evening before, along with Norton AntiVirus 2009. Naturally I probed Con gently about just why Symantec continues to roll out a standalone antivirus solution.

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.