14 antivirus apps found to have security problems
Found on The Register on Tuesday, 29 July 2014
COSEINC is a Singapore security outfit that has run a critical eye about 17 major antivirus engines and products and found dangerous local and remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities in 14.
"AV engines make your computer more vulnerable with a varying degree of performance penalty [and] is as vulnerable to zero day attacks as the applications it tries to protect from. [It] can even lower the operating system exploiting mitigations."
AV engines have peaked already. It doesn't make sense if an AV product detects 99.99% of all known viruses, because, well, it should figure out how to detect the unknown ones. Outbreaks spread world-wide within hours so fast signature updates are mission-critical. All that aside, most of the responsibility for security has the company behind the OS and software developers (hello Adobe Flash and Acrobat).