Antivirus Is 'Completely Wasted Money' Says Chief Security Officer of Cisco

Cisco's chief security officer John Stewart thinks that current antivirus protection doesn't work and that's why it's complete waste of money. Stewart shared his thoughts at Auscert 2008 security conference. According to him companies have so many virus infections that they've got used to them. Infections exist even if antivirus protection software is installed. Data criminals create new malware so quickly that antivirus protection can't match its speed.

"If patching and antivirus is where I spend my money, and I'm still getting infected and I still have to clean up computers and I still need to reload them and still have to recover the user's data and I still have to reinstall it, the entire cost equation of that is a waste.", says Stewart according to Zdnet Australia.

Stewart sees using of whitelists as a better solution. This would mean that only authorized and approved software would have permission to execute. That way malware couldn't access the system even if other protection fell down.

Nowadays antivirus protection companies have made their product packages include also pre-defensive protection fixing weak points of traditional antivirus protection.