Is the end of anti-virus finally here?

Is the end of anti-virus finally here?

By Roger A. Grimes


I first heard that the anti-virus scanner was dead in December 1989. Experts had postulated that the increase in the number of different computer viruses, which at the time numbered almost 200, would quickly outpace the ability of anti-virus scanners to keep up.

That seems a laughable prediction now: Anti-virus scanners and vendors are adaptable, and they only have limited performance problems even when faced with 50,000 or 100,000 threats. Despite this flexibility, the premature announcement of the death of the anti-virus scanner still seems to herald every new malware threat. File executable viruses were going to kill them. Then macro viruses, script viruses, polymorphism, and now root kits.

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Virus Masquerades as Symantec Update

BitDefender analysts warn of a new virus spreading via an email which masquerades as a Symantec security update:

The e-mail, written in Portuguese, informs the recipients that a new virus is in the wild and advises them to download a removal tool from Symantec. The advertised link actually leads to a fake website and automatically starts the download procedure for an actual virus.

"We are working to fully characterize the virus and trying to track down the author. We are also cooperating with local authorities and the affected provider in shutting down the malicious website. Although BitDefender users are not at risk, we have received reports of infections in the wild, so we are treating this matter with the utmost care" declared Mircea Mitu for BitDefender.

The new virus was detected by BitDefender products pro-actively (without a signature update) as BehavesLike:Win32.SMTP-Mailer, using the patent pending B-HAVE heuristic detection technology and was first spotted on July 24. The e-mail containing the link to the virus was also detected as spam by BitDefender.

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