Are the Traditional Anti-Malware Software Effective?

Dr. Jayshree Pandya, Founder of Cyber-Security Risk Research Center at Risk Group discusses "Are the Traditional Anti-Malware Software Effective" with Igor Volovich, CEO of Romad Cyber Systems.   Introduction In a Digital Global Age, each year brings more complex security threats, advanced malicious code and unexpected security vulnerabilities. While security industry is making a serious attempt to fight back to secure cyberspace, geospace and space (CGS), in the escalating arms race against advanced malware, the efforts to manage security risks using traditional tools is facing complex challenges. As malicious software or malware are evolving and becoming very sophisticated, malware threats are becoming very costly for nations: its government, industries, organizations, academia and individuals (NGIOA-I), With the sophisticated hacking tools becoming abundant and cheap, the rapidly multiplying security threats and vulnerabilities across CGS, is greatly simplifying the effort required for intruders or criminals to compromise any computer network anywhere in the world. Moreover, when computer applications now often share components and data with one another creating multiple integration points-- using respective organizational network as their primary interface, it further complicates the already complex security efforts in CGS. While hacking once largely constituted an academic exercise for security enthusiasts, hacking for profit has now become a rapidly growing criminal industry. When entire underground world is springing up that is solely focusing on making money by invading nations: its government, industries, organizations, academia and individuals network resources, it is a cause of great concern! It is perhaps time to go beyond outdated traditional desktop endpoint virus scanners and network-based intrusion prevention products to the next generation anti malware tools that can effectively bring security to CGS. Are the Traditional Malware Software Effective? As the nature of threats in cyberspace has changed significantly over the years, there is a growing concern that Anti-Malware is dead. Today’s security threats are more complex than ever before. From Trojans, to viruses and worms, today’s Malware are designed to hijack computers and networks.  As the malicious code gets embedded through e-mail links or attachments, injected into fake software applications, or web pages loaded with Trojan gets installed on hundreds of thousands of machines, this is the reason, in recent years, the ability of traditional signature-based anti-malware solutions to deal with the growing complexity of today’s cyber-attacks has been called into serious question. Moreover, the speed at which today’s threats from cyberspace strike is not responsive to human intelligence and capabilities. Many of today’s ‘successful’ cyber threats use artificial intelligence and make use of multiple attack mechanisms. This makes it very difficult for human intelligence to respond to using the traditional Anti-Malware mechanisms. Today’s cyber-security threats are faster than ever before. Where it used to take weeks, or even months, for a Malware to achieve widespread circulation in cyberspace, threats from cyberspace can now achieve global distribution in hours or may be even shorter time. It is this decreasing speed of malware circulation and the increasing speed of malware development that has placed a greater emphasis than ever before on the speed at which anti-malware vendors need to respond to new security threats. There was a time that quarterly updates were enough for cyber-security. However, the increasing number of malware's and the speed at which they are being created, distributed and infected has changed the fundamentals of cyber-security. While virus definitions are available faster than ever before, there is a huge gap between the appearance of a new threat and the effective means of blocking it using the trad...