[pchelpers] Article:Anti-virus no defense against botnets, says vendor

by John E. Dunn
November 28, 2008, 11:17 AM —  Techworld.com —  

A new analysis of botnets has come up with a possible reason for their
prodigious ability to infect PCs - many anti-virus programs are near to
useless in blocking the binaries used to spread them.

According to FireEye chief scientist Stuart Staniford, detection rates
are so poor that, on average, only around 40 percent of security
software can detect binaries during the period of greatest infectivity
and danger, namely the first few days after a particular variant starts
being used by botnet builders.

In a detailed blog, he describes how he uploaded a sample of 217
binaries culled from FireEye appliances in customer premises between
September and November to the independent VirusTotal test website. This
runs 36 anti-virus programs - a representative sample of the security
programs used by businesses and individuals - giving researchers access
to data on get statistics on how many malware binaries have already been
uploaded to the site by other researchers, when they were uploaded and
how many were detected by each program.

More here:
http://www.itworld.com/security/58529/anti-virus-no-defense-against-botnets-says-vendor
-- 
John Durham
Site http://modecideas.com
Server hosted on Ubuntu 4.10
Good advice is like good paint. It only works when applied.



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