A study undertaken into the effectiveness of anti-virus software by Hewlett-Packard`s labs in Bristol, UK, has shown that new viruses spread faster than anti-virus patches can be distributed.
According to New Scientist, Matthew Williamson, a HP researcher, designed a computer model to mimic the way in which viruses spread and then introduced parameters to represent the way the anti-virus software responds to this. The result showed that since anti-virus software checks for updates no more than once an hour, this is too slow to curb the spread.
Justin Doo, Trend Micro`s EMEA MD, concurs. "Half an hour is a long time in a virus outbreak cycle these days - it is critical. Releasing a pattern file and a scan engine takes time to be tested, more than a few hours."
He points out that while older viruses were created to damage boot sectors of computers, newer versions are created with the intent of spreading as fast as possible. "There seems to be some sort of esteem associated with creating fast-spreading viruses. There is a growing concern that going forward, we will start to see viruses that spread quickly, but also deliver a payload on computers in their path."
This is a worrying possibility if current anti-virus software is too slow to deal with an outbreak, but Doo says there is some hope. "We have launched a new initiative that allows us to deploy outbreak prevention policies, a kind of pre-identification or warning of a virus attack, which takes into account what the virus looks like or how it is spread before the pattern file can be released," he says.
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