People use a lot of heuristics (rules) to help them make decisions about which product to buy.
One of the main indicators is price. "If it costs twice as much, it must be better."
Another indicator is market position. "If its the #1 seller, it must be the best one."
Apparently, when it comes to Windows virus protection both of these rules will lead you to the worst products.
Another thing to keep in mind is that malware (malicious software) is not designed to ruin your computer or erase your hard drive. Malware today is largely for business uses. This software is designed to hijack your computer and use it for illegal purposes, like denial of service attacks or click-fraud. This is why so many people are infected and are unaware of it. (Unless they use a Mac of course.) For more on this, the comments on Digg are quite interesting.
Why popular antivirus apps 'do not work'
21 July 2006 04:38 PM
Antivirus applications from Symantec, McAfee or Trend Micro -- the three leading AV vendors in 2005 -- are far less likely to detect new viruses and Trojans than the least popular brands.
On Wednesday, the general manager of Australia's Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT), Graham Ingram, described how the threat landscape has changed -- along with the skill of malware authors.
"The most popular brands of antivirus on the market… have an 80 percent miss rate… So if you are running these pieces of software, eight out of 10 pieces of malicious code are going to get in," said Ingram.
Although Ingram didn't mention any of the leading losers by name, Gartner's figures for 2005 show that Symantec is the clear leader with 53.6 percent of the market. McAfee and Trend own 18.8 percent and 13.8 percent of the market respectively.
One vendor Ingram did mention was Russian outfit Kaspersky, which in the same tests managed to block around 90 percent of new malware.
According to Gartner, Kaspersky's market share is a lowly 0.7 percent.
