Security Bites 105: Does antivirus protection matter?

This week CNET's Robert Vamosi talks with Eva Chen, co-founder and CEO of Trend Micro.

For more than 20 years Chen has been active in the antimalware community and has kept her company competitive worldwide against competition such as Symantec and McAfee

Chen visited CNET to talk about Trend Micro's ambitious goal of putting anti-malware protection in the cloud. She argues that signature-based protection is still faster than running a full heuristic sandbox to detect new malicious software.

Chen thinks that by having your desktop ping a signature database in the cloud you'll get a faster, lighter, and more accurate, anti-malware protection for your desktop. Also, when new malware is discovered on your desktop, a sample can be sent to the cloud, analyzed, and if necessary, a new signature created--protecting not only you but anyone else who finds it.

Clearly threats and protection have both changed over the years. Recently, some security experts have been talking about doing away with antivirus protection, saying that most of the threats today are coming from Web 2.0 sources, and can be better blocked with firewalls and secure Web browsers.

Of course, Chen disagrees.

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