Antivirus solutions were developed with signatures in mind. Since all pieces of malware have been known to have a common identifier (or, signature), vendors knew this would be a wise way to identify and eliminate malware from people’s systems. Unfortunately, this mindset is slowly fading away. With the evolution of new dynamic forms of malware, signature-based detection engines are slowly becoming obsolete. Granted, a lot of antivirus solutions don’t strictly rely on signatures to detect malware, but signatures have been a focal point of many antivirus packages. It looks like technologies such as heuristics are going to have to step up and take more action, but we’ll see.

Signature-based malware detection techniques are becoming less effective in the face of so-called ‘malware 2.0′ threats, a security firm claimed today.

“The security space is changing rapidly. We are witnessing a major shift in the anti-malware marketplace moving into a new era of malware 2.0,” said Kurt Baumgartner, chief threat officer at PC Tools.

“We are now dealing with zero-minute, rather than just zero-day, exploits that have the potential to further evade signature detections.”

PC Tools said that malware variants are now released at “immense rates”, driving up sample volumes and making it almost impossible for researchers to keep on top of updates using manual analysis.[more]

Tags: Malware, Computer Protection