Mikko Hypponen (Chief Research Officer for F-Secure) found that antivirus developers have suffered a complete fiasco. What are the benefits of their products, if viruses circulate freely and work over the years? Flame malware successfully spied on users at least two years, and this is an optimistic estimate! Mikko
Hypponen - a renowned expert who is working on developing antivirus for more than 20 years. In his time he has seen the most dangerous virus outbreaks, including Loveletter, Blaster, Conficker and Stuxnet. So he knows whereof he speaks. Video of a recent speech Mikko Hypponen at the conference TED Talk watched over half a million people!
Flame - this is not the first incident that points to the archaic and ineffective traditional model of antivirus programs. "Flame was a failure for the antivirus software industry - says Mikko Hypponen. - We really should have had the opportunity to do something. But we did not have such an opportunity. We are faced with an opponent from the other league, in our own game."
Reasons for Flame could not find out for years, are clear: any antivirus software running on the basis of signatures, as the virus did not get into this database, it will not be detected. At the same time, developers of the virus Flame done everything possible to avoid detection (eg, Flame check for virus on infected computers).
Thus, the reliability of commercial antivirus is highly questionable. Especially the bad thing is that the antivirus gives users a false sense of security.
