Is antivirus software dead? Some might say so while others disagree. There are two sides of every coin as the saying goes.
Brian Dye, who is the senior vice president for information security at Symantec, which includes products such as Norton, thinks it is dead. However, others in the industry disagree, and this includes Eugene Kaspersky, head of Kaspersky Lab, a Symantec/Norton rival and a company that specialize in online security.
This strong division of ideas is present in the companies' product rivalry, which spans across operating systems and supported hardware - from mobile to cloud to desktop.
"We don't think of antivirus as a moneymaker in any way," Dye told the Wall Street Journal in a latest interview. "Antivirus is dead."
Instead of trying to keep hackers or intruders out from the Firewall and system, he thinks the aim should be to spot them and minimize the damage they can inflict on a system or user's data.
There are companies in the industry that fall in line with this thinking up to such an extent; they want to introduce fake data for these hackers to nab before they are identified. An example of this is Juniper Network's Argon Secure.
Kaspersky responded to this line up thinking with an e-mail to The Inquirer.
"I've heard antiviruses being declared dead and buried quite a few times over the years, but they're still here with us - alive and kicking," he says. "I fully agree that single-layer signature-based virus scanning is nowhere near a sufficient degree of protection - not for individuals, not for organizations large or small; however, that's been the case for many years."
Both companies and individuals seem to embrace the idea that we need multiple layers of protection to really be secure in this day and age. Using virus scanning or relying on simple endpoint security methods is really not enough for those who truly value their data or information.
Security is a combination of various technologies that include heuristics, sandboxing, cloud protection and more, Kaspersky said. However, these methods work well along with "time-tested signature-based virus detection" being included in that approach as well.
So although we may need more protection now than ever in terms of security, the average user probably should still keep antivirus around in some ways. At least, Kaspersky think so.
