A survey of the antivirus industry and its problems

The total market for such standard solutions was estimated as being $2.7 billion in 2003 and $3.3 billion in 2004, with $3.8 billion being the predicted figure for 2005. All antivirus manufacturers are divided into 3 groups; industry leaders, second tier companies, and others (those which have no significant effect - if any - on the antivirus landscape).
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Problem #1: The number and variety of malicious programs is increasing year on year. The result is that many antivirus companies are simply unable to cope with the onslaught and are losing this 'virus arms race'. Users who chose products manufactured by such companies will not be protected against all malicious programs. Unfortunately, this may be a large number of users, as a lot of products marketed as 'antivirus solutions' shouldn't really be called this at all.

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Problem #2: Today, malicious programs propagate so quickly that antivirus companies have to release updates as quickly as possible to minimize the amount of time that users will potentially be at risk. Unfortunately, many antivirus companies are unable to do this - users often receive updates once they are already infected.
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Problem #3: The third problem faced by the antivirus industry is deleting malicious code detected on the victim machine. Very often viruses and Trojans are written in a way which enables them to hide their presence in the system and/ or to penetrate the system so deeply that deleting them is a complex task. Unfortunately, some antivirus programs are unable to delete malicious code and restore the data which has been modified by the virus without causing further problems.
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Problem #4: Unfortunately, the issue of resource usage is almost insoluble. Experience shows that antivirus solutions which offer rapid scanning are heavily flawed, and will let viruses and Trojans through like water through a sieve. However, the opposite is also not true; antivirus programs which run slowly do not necessarily offer effective protection.
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Problem #5: Incompatibility between antivirus programs is an issue; in the vast majority of cases, installing two antivirus programs from different vendors on one machine (for increased protection) is technically impossible, as the two programs will disrupt each other's functioning.
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Currently, the most experienced testers of antivirus products currently are Andreas Marx (Germany http://www.av-test.org) and Andreas Clementi (Austria http://www.av-comparatives.org).
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It's also worth mentioning the tests conducted by VirusBulletin (an industry publication)


Fuente: SecurityPark.net