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Taking place London’s Earl’s Court, last month’s InfoSecurity Europe 2012 saw over 300 exhibitors all keen to talk security.
PCR caught up with BitDefender’s Shaun Donaldson to chat about the evolution of viruses.
Are you seeing an evolution in viruses, maybe due to the increase in mobile devices and the Cloud?
The attacks are always changing so that never stops, and certainly as the type of endpoints that people are using and how they use those endpoints changes, the attacks change with that.
Attacks will always evolve but what’s important is that the architecture of security has to operate properly within the architecture of the environment.
Of course that means security on mobile devices can’t drain a battery in half an hour, security in a virtualised environment can’t have a negative impact on an RLI or else people wont use it. To me the issue is two- sided, with the change in architectures and the change in attacks.
So would you say it’s a change in the way these attacks are happening rather than a new threat altogether?
That’s a difficult question because in some ways the evolution can be quite subtle, with more complex root kits. Although root kits have been around for a long time, but they’re getting more and more sophisticated.
Also, perhaps attacks that are specific to virtualized environments. We may see attacks against mobile systems and different forms of attacks where really an attack is either taking over a system and gaining control or to get the data. For instance take an example from Android, simply having someone install an application and not look at what that application is going to do and you’re agreeing that that application is going to take significant data and pull it off your phone – that is a new type of attack.
But they tend to be variations on the tried and tested social methods, the hardcore buffer overflows, so attackers always gravitate towards the simplest thing that works.
BitDefender was recently declared the world’s reigning anti-virus champion by AV-TEST. What are the company’s plans going forward, and how do you maintain such a high standard in that field?
We’re very focused on R&D, we’ve got a very strong anti-malware team, and we’re always innovating on technology, and trying to anticipate what attackers will do next.
We do have quite a good track record and we’ve always been at or near the top.
We’re based in Romania and the quality of engineers that we have working for us very high – they’re the world’s best, and they are very enthusiastic about keeping us ahead.
It’s not necessarily because they want to always be number one, but it’s because they’re a group of people that absolutely love what they do.
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