Throwback Thursday: Safe Hex in the 21st Century

This Throwback Thursday, we turn the clock back to July 2000, when we were already being warned that virus scanners were no longer enough.

How many times have we heard commentators claim that anti-virus is dead? After all, in the current threat landscape, who would use a system that relies solely on signatures of previously seen malware? In fact, AV moved well beyond signatures — even heuristic signatures — a long time ago.

Fifteen years ago, many of the technologies that complement signature scanning today had yet to be implemented, but even back then, industry members were cautioning against over-reliance on virus scanners.

In July 2000, Martin Overton wrote a tutorial piece for

VB

about ‘Safe Hex in the 21st Century’, warning: “If we don’t break out of the ‘virus-scanner-is-king’ mind set that many have fallen into then we will be doomed to keep repeating the same mistakes forever. Virus scanners have their place but … virus scanners are no longer enough.”

Martin’s piece advised that we should stop using DOCs, that we should make regular backups, turn off Windows Scripting Host if it wasn’t required, and overall, to use scanners wisely and deploy a diversity of products at different points.

Martin Overton’s article can be read

here

in HTML-format, or downloaded

here

as a PDF.

Posted on 27 August 2015 by

Helen Martin