Antivirus is Dead, Long Live Antivirus!

There's been a lot of speculation recently around the future of desktop antivirus, and whether or not desktop antivirus will still be required "in the future" - i.e. once behavior-based systems become finely-tuned enough to deal with a majority of computer viruses.

The answer to this question is "antivirus is not going away any time soon".

As Robert Sandilands has already indicated in his Virus Blog, signature-based desktop antivirus will remain firmly in place, but will be complemented by advanced heuristical analysis, such as the type that we are building into our version 5 engine.

Safety mechanisms rarely disappear. Like car seatbelts, which were later augmented by airbags, desktop antivirus will remain a core component of device security solutions for years to come, as will other defensive technologies such as antispyware, antiphishing and URL filtering.

Antivirus will disappear eventually - the day that all data traversing the Internet, and all interacting consumer and corporate identities, become 100% trustworthy.