Antivirus software a waste of money for businesses, report suggests

Antivirus Software is now so ineffective at detecting new malware threats and most firms are probably wasting their money buying it, an analysis by IT security firm Imperva has concluded. A research team ran a collection of 82 new malware files through the VirusTotal System that checks files against 40 different antivirus products, finding that the initial detection rate  was a zero and its took three weeks for even the best-performing products to add the previously undetected sample to their database.

 The researchers recommend two free antivirus products, Avast & Emisoft and McAfee came up as an acceptable performer too.
Let's talk about businesses. Organisations continues to insist on licensed antivirus software but stipulation should allow them to "buy free products" instead and put the saved money into other forms of security. "To be clear, we don't recommend eliminating Antivirus. We do, however, recommend rebalancing and modernizing security spend to meet today's threats, " said the Imperva report.

In August NSS Labs noticed that many antivirus products were unable to block malware attacks exploiting two prominent Microsoft vulnerabilities that had been patched weeks before.