Is your antivirus protecting your PC from malware?

We have been using antivirus software to protect our PCs from viruses and malware for a long time. But nowadays, questions are being raised regularly that whether these antivirus programs are still useful and competent enough to protect our systems.

So far, these security programs or suites were considered as an integral part of our computers but the innovative ways by which malware is being delivered during the last one and half year, indicate that these AVs alone are not adequate to keep our PCs protected. As told earlier, it is the evolution of mode of malware delivery from e-mail to the internet that has consistently challenged the efficiency and role of antivirus software.

Nowadays, despite being installed with a top-rated antivirus program your system sometimes becomes victim of threats like viruses, malware, worms and Trojans. It suggests that there are some species of online threats that are able to bypass the AV security arrangements.

Commenting on these persisting security breaches, one of leading security experts in the industry says that over the last fourteen months there has been an eightfold increase in the use of browser exploits by malicious authors to deliver threats like malware. After acknowledging this data, it is not at all difficult to deduce the speed with which this problem is becoming dominant over the security provided by antivirus programs. Moreover, it was also found during a study that this technique is responsible for around 75 of the infections that further aggravate the problem.

You would not be able to imagine the ways these malware authors are fast approaching to infect your system. The propagation of malware has today grown to this extent because antivirus software has failed to a great extent. Today cyber criminals are having options to buy malware and they can also hire freelancer developers to write malware. Botnets can also be hired that are used to execute phishing via enticing e-mails. The evolution of malware delivery technology has gone to an extent where malware cyber criminals can host malware on servers which they hire for better penetration and malware endurance.

Using the modern technology of malware delivery, these malicious authors can monitor the rate at which antivirus program detects malware infection. Using this feature they can either modify malware or replace it with Trojan or virus if they realize that the malware they have placed is failing or proving incapable to bypass the signature engines.

Because of these modern techniques of delivery, malware is frequently exploiting the browser plug-ins to infect the systems and thus easily bypass the PC security made by antivirus software.

The entire episode is not just about the problems with malware delivery. It is majorly related to the browser exploit through various plug-ins such as such Java, Flash and Adobe Reader which are often used by cyber criminals to deliver the malware.

Experts who have extensively monitored the steps of these cyber criminals came out with many surprising results. According to experts, these ‘exploit’ authors are very intelligent and take steps swiftly. As these exploit websites keep on targeting the systems regularly or after every 2-3 hours, the efficiency of AV is no more relevant. This is one of the reasons why antivirus software are failing these days.

Stopping malware alone is not enough to protect your PC rather you also need to find an alternative of exploits that are frequently used by the malware. It would be desirable to close the openings to exploit that provide passage to malware and thus preventing malware from using them to enter into the PCs. One effective way to achieve this is to use patches for plug-ins.

On the basis of above discussion it can be easily concluded that antivirus software have failed in protecting our PCs from the malware that are on the rise consistently. Preventing cyber criminals from using the browser exploits in form of Java, Flash and Adobe Reader seem to be a viable option to protect our PCs in the present circumstances.