What was once known anti-virus software in the industry is clearly down the pit, with a Symantec executive in fact admitting that anti-virus is "dead."
Symantec, a Mountain View company, is a pioneer in computer security, creating anti-virus software in the late ‘80s such as the infamous Norton.
"We don't think of antivirus as a moneymaker in any way," Brian Dye, senior vice president for information security at Symantec, says to The Wall Street Journal.
The announcement, however, came as a big shock to Symantec customers who have been paying for the Norton software for about $50 per year.
"It's quite a bold statement. [AntiVirus] on its own is no longer sufficient. The threat landscape has diversified so much, and AV companies have not adapted as fast," Jerome Segura, senior security researcher at Malwarebytes told International Business Times.
Symantec's commercial anti-virus software and products were intended to secure the computer system and prevent hackers from invading the system -- but times are evolving, and hackers do get in anyhow with the use of new bugs.
For instance, the report says Iran-linked hackers penetrated the digital parameters of energy companies and one of the five largest banks in the U.S. last spring, but they were trapped before they could move any further into the companies' systems -- to think that the two companies were said to have the best cyberdefenses in the private sector. Aside from Iran, the most ambitious hackers were said to come from the former Soviet bloc and China.
Dye assesses that only 45 percent of cyberattacks are being caught by its anti-virus software, which places the company in a jam because over 40 percent of its revenue comes from such products that serve individual devices. Its specialized cybersecurity services intended for businesses only account for less than one-fifth of the income. The past two quarters showed how its revenue went down the slope, even though cost cuts pushed a growth in profits.
Which is why Dye is taking the lead to reinvent the company into one that will mirror a bigger shift in the cybersecurity industry that is worth $70 billion a year.
"It's one thing to sit there and get frustrated. It's another thing to act on it, go get your act together and go play the game you should have been playing in the first place," Dye says, noting the frustration of seeing other security companies get ahead in the industry.
Instead of a continuous struggle to fight the bad guys off the system, several companies created new technologies whose aim is to spot hackers and reduce the damage they can do.
Here's what a few companies are doing now:
• Juniper Networks Inc. advises customers to put fake date inside their firewalls to distract the hackers. Juniper is a maker of network equipments.
• Shape Security Inc. knows that hackers intend to steal passwords and credit-card numbers, thus it pursues to make it harder for these hackers to use such stolen data. Shape Security is a startup business at Silicon Valley.
• FireEye Inc. invented a new technology that skims through networks for any malicious-looking computer code that may have gone past the first line of defense. The company lately paid a billion dollars to Mandiant, a small company spearheaded by former investigators at the Air Force who are said to be "cyber-Ghostbusters" after breach of data.
Many other traditional anti-virus makers are also moving into the new direction, such as Intel's McAfee security unit and International Business Machine Corp.
This week, Symantec is said to be joining these companies to come up with its own response team that will help businesses that are hacked. It is planning to sell to its clients intelligence briefings on particular threats so that these clients not only know they are being hacked but the reason for hacking as well. It intends to work on such project within six months. Not only that, it is also working on a new technology that will search for more advanced type of malicious software within a network that imitates offerings from rivals.
Dye however says there's no abandoning Norton, which has advanced beyond being anti-virus software, but the new product lines are the ones seen to provide revenue growth. In March, Symantec fired its CEO Steve Bennett, said to be the company's second time to kick a CEO in two years.
