Your Antivirus Is Antiquated

By Carrie Landry, Rubica

Your antivirus is antiquated. It’s vintage, invented in the 80’s for a completely different world than yours. It’s always chasing yesterday’s virus signatures. It doesn’t keep up with the cybercriminals, their ideas, or their malware. Yet you keep using it for yourself and your businesses. Relying on antivirus for remote workers as a cybersecurity strategy is a huge mistake. And it starts at the very root of how antivirus works both for you and against you.

Antivirus is the cybercriminal’s favorite tool

I was talking to our former hacker, current CTO Riley Eller, also known as Caezar. As the inventor of the DDOS attack, his mind understands security from both the offensive and defensive side. And this is how a malware engineer sees antivirus: as a whetstone. Each day, Norton and the other antivirus companies update their malware and virus signatures. Let’s assume antivirus protected against all kinds of malware (it doesn’t) and on all devices, cross-platform (it doesn’t). But assuming it offered perfect protection against yesterday’s malware…each morning cybercriminals download the latest version of the antivirus software and start the day’s hunt for new, unprotected devices.

Here’s Riley’s analogy: much like a chef sharpens blades against one another, cybercriminals sharpen their malware against antivirus each morning when viral signatures update. Then they analyze whatever new code got pushed at midnight and build an instant variant antivirus won’t catch until at least tomorrow, and you cross your fingers and hope you don’t get the latest invention. Their revenue stream depends on it. He says “as a cybercriminal you come out of that sharpening in the morning knowing with confidence how effective your tool will be that day.”