Anti-virus software (AV) is found on most Windows desktops (well over 90%). But many people are amazed at this, because conventional wisdom is that anti-virus technologies absolutely suck. Technical people will often claim that AV “doesn’t work”, and that it “causes stability problems”. And almost everyone will claim that it “slows your machine down”. While there is a lot of truth here, there are also a lot of misconceptions about how AV works, and why it fails.

In this talk, I’ll give an overview of AV technology, the challenges the industry has faced, and the solutions that the industry has been exploring to address those issues, including virtualization, herd technology, application whitelisting, and reputation systems.

About John Viega

John Viega is Executive Vice President of Products and Engineering at Perimeter eSecurity. John has authored numerous books on security, including the recent “Myths of Security”, and the seminal “Building Secure Software”, which was the first book on application security.

Prior to Perimeter, John was at McAfee, where he was CTO and VP of Engineering for the Software-as-a-Service business unit. Before that, he was McAfee’s Chief Security Architect, where he worked on M+A and also owned McAfee’s core technologies, such as anti-virus and the SiteAdvisor product.

John also founded Secure Software, raising a Series A from Charles River Ventures. The company was later acquired by Fortify, where John is still an advisor. John is an editor for IEEE Security and Privacy magazine, and his technical work in cryptography has been standardized by NIST, the IEEE and IETF. He has a MS in Computer Science and a BA from the University of Virginia.