WELLINGTON – Google’s senior security engineer has raised eye brows of the I.T gurus by suggesting that the Antiviruses were actually useless.
Tech expert Darren Bilby while speaking at the ‘Kiwicon’ hacking conference here on Thursday likened antivirus to a canary in the coal mine.
“Antivirus does some useful things, but in reality, it is more like a canary in the coal mine. It is worse than that. It’s like we are standing around the dead canary saying ‘Thank god it inhaled all the poisonous gas’ Bilby said.
Quoting a series of cyber attacks named ‘2009 Operation Aurora campaign’ that made scores of computers vulnerable to attacks, Bilby said there was no need of ‘magic’ through ineffective Antivirus.
‘We need to stop investing in those things we have shown do not work’ he said.
Bilby also berated the original programmers behind malware and phasing links instead of taking aim at the end users who fall prey to them.
‘We are giving people systems that are not safe for the internet and we are blaming the user’ Bilby said.
Advice on safe internet use is “horrible”, he added.
He urged his fellow hackers to expend less effort on tools like antivirus and intrusion detection while focusing more on researching meaningful defences such as whitelisting applications.
