Another study, another set of results that support that the malware threat is quickly outpacing traditional protections. Antivirus vendor PandaLabs released a study yesterday showing that the number of infected PCs worldwide increased by 15% in September. The average number of PCs hit by malware now stands around 59 percent, with the U.S. checking in with a 58 percent infection rate.
The data was pulled from “users that scanned and disinfected their computers with the free Panda ActiveScan online antivirus”. There is no way to know if those users were already running an AV product on their machine, although that data would have really been instructive. Given that these users were running free software it is likely that these are consumer users or small businesses and not enterprise customers, and there is no breakdown of user type in the study.
What the study does show is that the malware problem is getting worse, not better, and that this malware is finding its way to machines. With a plethora of studies showing AV detection rates at less than 50% (some significantly less) it is safe to assume that even with traditional protections in place a lot is getting through.
Of course the obvious question is what did the scanning tool not find? The PandaLabs tools is signature based, meaning it could only find what is already known, leaving any number of already working attacks undiscovered. These infection numbers would undoubtedly be higher if everything could be seen and counted.
The story is simple. Lots of bad stuff is getting through traditional protections, and the bad guys are making more bad stuff and making it harder to detect every day. Traditional protections can only see what is already known in the form of signatures, and even when a signature exists the failure rate is too high. And we haven’t even begun the discussion of seeing all of the damage from an infection or properly remediating the damage. The AV vendors continue to trot out new functions and features to try and patch the gap in their offerings, but it is clear you need something more.
This study supports what I said in an earlier post when I compared traditional protections to an umbrella on a rainy day and noted it is raining and you will get wet. This study is yet another brick in the wall of support for that thesis, and shows again that you will have to decide just how wet you are willing to get.
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