This article is more than 1 year old

Security firms taking days to block malware

Can you hold on till Friday?

Anti-malware vendors can take up to 92.48 hours to block malicious sites, potentially leaving clients in blissful ignorance of threats to their systems in the meantime.

Security researchers NSS Labs reviewed a range of endpoint security products from ten big-name security vendors and their response to "socially engineered or consensual malware threats".

It said 15,000 to 50,000 such threats were presenting themselves per day.

Effectiveness rates varied from a 35 per cent block rate to a more comforting 88.3 per cent.

Vendors' average times to respond to new threats ranged from 4.62 hours to 92.48 hours, with the high end turned in by Panda, NSS Labs said. Of the 10 vendors profiled, just three managed response times of less than 30 hours.

The researchers concluded that vendors with "in the cloud reputation systems" kept much more malware off their clients' desktops.

Sadly, most vendors do not have such systems, or, the report concluded, they are still immature and have yet to have an impact on detection rates.

Vendors covered by the survey were: AVG, Norman, ESET,  Panda, F-Secure, Sophos, Kaspersky, Symantec, McAfee, and Trend Micro.

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