Smaller vendors question rumours of impending doom

Experts deny claims that flood of threats gives bigger firms advantage.

High levels of new malware, emerging at an ever-increasing rate, may mean smaller security firms will no longer be able to keep up with their larger rivals, according to an analyst with market research firm

Gartner

. However, the suggestion that malware detection is becoming too big a task has been roundly rejected by several mid-sized security companies.

Research labs have been seeing over 1,000 new samples per day, with over 200,000 reported by

Symantec

in the first half of 2007. The analyst, in an interview with

InfoWorld

, suggested that this heavy influx could mean that only the biggest firms, with the biggest reserves of funding and staff, will be able to continue to compete.

Symantec

,

McAfee

,

Microsoft

and

Trend Micro

are all named as being big enough to stay afloat in the market.

The idea was dismissed by representatives of some ‘second-tier’ vendors, who suggested that automation techniques were more than keeping up with increasing workflow, with heuristics and generic detection meaning that many new samples are already spotted, and that quality of staff was more important than quantity. Eugene Kaspersky compared the security market to the world of cars, with the bigger vendors representing the major global manufacturers and the smaller vendors ‘more like Lamborghini’, without the increased price. Smaller vendors, including

Kaspersky

,

BitDefender

and

Avira

, also frequently show better detection rates than their larger rivals in independent tests.

Full analysis and comment on the suggestions are in the

InfoWorld

report

here

.

Posted on 05 October 2007 by

Virus Bulletin