More scary news before the X-mas from Antivirus vendors

Computer threats becoming more sophisticated

By Computing staff
11 December 2008

The scale and sophistication of IT security threats increased at an unprecedented rate during 2008, according to a series of end-of-year research studies published last week.

Anti-virus vendor Kaspersky Lab said that 15 million new forms of malware will have been detected by the end of this year ­ up from just two million in 2007.

IBM said data from its 3,700 managed security services customers worldwide showed that the number of security events rose from 1.8 billion to 2.5 billion per day over the past four months alone.

And security firm F-Secure said the level of malware detections trebled over the year to equal the total amount accumulated over the previous 21 years.

“It would be no surprise if the cyber-crime business [in 2008] was worth not less than US$100bn, said Kaspersky Lab chief executive Eugene Kaspersky. “Unfortunately, the anti-malware industry is in a panic. It has finally recognised that it needs to invest more in technology.”

Kaspersky estimated that there are “tens of thousands of people in the cyber-crime business”, and that security vendors are engaging in technical espionage and battling with each other to recruit the best engineers to keep up.

Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer at F-Secure, said online crime is now more prevalent and more professional than ever before, and put the blame on the inability of national and international authorities to catch, prosecute and sentence computer criminals.

“The bottom line is that too few of the perpetrators of internet crime are either caught or punished,” he said. “If no action is taken it sends the message to these criminals that internet crime is an easy way to make a lot of money and they will never be caught or punished.”

Copyright © 2008 Computing

As expected from every year's end of the year reports by AV vendors, in another words it's expected numbers as number of computers are increasing as well as market competitions becoming difficult and these AV vendors are scared of financial meltdown may led to slow sale.
So this may help them to stay.

Importance of QA in Antivirus Industry: Case 1 - False positive detection

Just recently AVG offered infected customers with free one year license or update.
Read the article:

AVG offers infected users free year of service

By Emma Hughes
17 November 2008 07:06AM
Security

AVG announced yesterday that it would be offering a free year of service after its antivirus software got confused and misidentified a key Windows system file as malware.

The problem affected non-English versions of XP.

The security vendor identified earlier this week that user32.dll was coming up as a generic Trojan which caused a warning pop-up asking if the user wanted to delete it – unfortunately for those who say ‘yes’ they were stuck in an endless reboot cycle.

Once the floods of complaints began, AVG identified the mistake and began offering workarounds for affected users – which is fine if you’ve got someone else to look it up for you.

Yesterday however, AVG announced, "As a follow-up to the rapid distribution of recovery instructions and repair CDs, AVG Technologies is offering all affected users a free license or license extension as follows.”

This basically means a free year of AVG 8.0 service, or a free upgrade for AVG 7.5 users.

The upgrade also includes users of the free AVG antivirus service.

Once the company began apologising, it seemed to be unable to stop, "AVG Technologies apologises again for the inconvenience caused to our customers and wishes to assure our users worldwide that the company is actively putting new processes in place to avoid similar occurrences in the future.”

AVG has said that it will begin contacting affected customers beginning November 24 in order to give further instructions on this service.

Look how important is QA testing for false positive in AV Industry; not only AVG have lost revenue for little mistake, it also created unwanted media attraction.

Few years ago and only few months ago, Symantec had exactly same thing when Norton AV was deleting part of Windows. It's all fixed up and updated now, but if these companies have done proper scanning testing before the release of their anti virus definitions or database then this wouldn't happened.

False positive detection must be cleared before the release of the anti virus definition/database, if only AV companies properly implemented QA testing lab to perform FP detection at least on popular operating systems like Windows XP/Vista then AV Industry won't spend their time & money on patching or fixing their mistakes.