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Can your Antivirus Protect you from latest Malware? Symantec disagrees

Symantec’s Norton, the commercial antivirus software invented in the late 1980s to protect computers from the hackers seems to have failed to serve its intention. As per a WSJ report, the company has agreed to this and its Senior Vice President for information security, Brain Dye said, “Antivirus “is dead. We don’t think of antivirus as a moneymaker in any way.”

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The company appears to be planning to implement some new technologies that will spot glitches in its network and function in a way that the damage caused by the cyber attack is minimized.  In addition to this, Symantec is also in plans to develop its own response team to be of help to the hacked businesses. There is also a technology that can look in for complex malicious software in a network resembling those of its competitors. The firm will also conduct meetings with its clients to brief them on how to stay protected from the attacks.

Besides being an antivirus software looking for suspicious activities and unseen virusues, Symantec also came with other features such as a spam blocker, a password manager and a tool to scan the Facebook feed of users to protect against dangerous links.

Not only Symantec, many other antivirus makers knew that they need to implement new technologies that could automate the process of detecting and classifying the malware hazards. For this, the companies were involved in buying many technologies that can build a quasi artificial intelligence system that is referred to as heuristic detection. This proved to highly effective as it controlled the malware attacks largely.

The bad side came up with their own innovations following this and it was termed crypting service that become one of the most lucrative topic in the cyber crime industry. This service takes a bad piece of malware and scans it alongside all the antivirus tools in the market to find out how many of them can detect it. This service runs a custom encryption process that obfuscates the malware and it repeats the scanning process in an iterative manner until the malware is completely undetectable.

But, this does not render the antivirus software useless as the products will still detect a new threat that was seen in the past. They may become ineffective to some extent, but they still can save the users from threats.

Apart from Norton, other antivirus makers including McAfee and Intel Corp’s security department have also moved away in order to spot and minimize attacks. Another company, Jupiter Networks Inc has recommended users to place fake data in their firewalls to divert the hackers. Also, Shape Security Inc, a startup wants the customers to use fake credit card and passwords to puzzle the hackers.

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Abhishek Bhatnagar

Abhishek Bhatnagar, a known technology blogger & YouTuber from India. A Software Engineer by qualification, now he works as the editor-In-Chief, Webmaster, & Managing Director at Gadgets To Use. He runs a number of other technology websites as well.