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| CURRENT SECTION :: TechZone | UK's most visited IT Contractor Site - 250k unique visitors March 2008 |
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More than half of anti-virus applications that claim to protect Windows 2000 fail to protect against all the malicious programmes known to be in the wild. Although less worrying for professional PC users, most of whom use XP, the finding suggests home users are wrong to think their live security update keeps them safe. Out of 32 pay-for virus defences, 17 were unable to detect and protecting against 100% of the viruses, some of which generated false alarms when scanning a set of clean files. Independent security tester Virus Bulletin said the failures included big-name anti-virus products including those built by Trend Micro, Kaspersky, Norman and Sophos. “It is particularly disappointing to see so many major products missing significant real-world threats,” said John Hawes, technical consultant at Virus Bulletin. “In these days of hourly updates computer users really ought to be able to rely on their chosen security vendors for full protection against known threats.” Hawes said his firm would work with virus labs worldwide to encourage they are more thorough in the testing of their commercial products. “The results of this latest round of testing have been the poorest scores for quite some time,” he said. “The main cause of the string of failures was a particularly nasty polymorphic virus, which many products failed to fully protect against. Polymorphic malware went out of fashion for some time but has recently become popular with malware writers once more, both in self-morphing viruses and in trojans morphed at the server side before delivery, all in an attempt to avoid detection by security software.” He added: “It is imperative that virus labs remain on their guard against all types of threats - and after this month's poor performance they must encourage more thorough checking of detection for file-infecting items in particular.” Dec 11, 2007 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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