Security apps flawed, too

Security researchers appear to be turning on themselves. Where security software was once accepted as "trustworthy," recent presentations have cast doubt on that. At this year's Defcon, security professionals from the announced security holes in Kismet and Metaploit, two security tools used by security professionals and criminal hackers alike. A few days earlier, at Black Hat, two independent security researchers announced numerous flaws in desktop antivirus apps. After the Black Hat presentation, I asked one of the presenters, Alex Wheeler, what the average desktop computer user will think when he or she hears this message. He said that commercial antivirus apps, in general, are pretty good at what they do but that it's important to remember that no software is 100 percent perfect. I guess constant vigilance is the price of computer security.