The Anti-Virus industry has been rendered ineffective for quite sometime and this came into attention only with one industry expert speaking out of the crowd to say so “AS IS”. We have all been under the impression that the security of our PC’s, Laptops and other computers has been quite effective and robust with online active updates that allows them to deal with evolving threats. The problem is as the discussion states, how do you deal with today’s millions upon millions of viruses and other forms of threats without super-computing status? You can’t, that is the reality we have to face that there is no one solution to the problem and that it is going to stay that way.
Anti-virus software engineers do their jobs round the clock to prevent these malware form doing the most harm on the millions if not billions of computers around the world that connects to the internet daily. As one sector of the globe goes to sleep, another wakes up to a new day of infections and threats that is exaggerated more by the constant online status of some pc’s meaning they are always connected whatever time of day it is. Imagine scanning through a database that can give you the ability to determine a virus among the millions of known types, variants and mutations (even with a super-computer it takes time) every time you download a file or click on an internet link, that would be unfathomable. The best these guys can do and hope for is that they (the many anti-virus vendors) get to the problem early on when the virus or malware is still propagating when they can still reverse engineer it, then issue the proper identifiers along with the removal instructions that they send out to their respective clients hoping they are still not infected and spreading the virus themselves.
If they already are infected, it takes more time to formulate an approach on how to remove the problem form the computer system leaving it untouched and without the threat. This is almost next to impossible for any seasoned PC user knows that anything that is installed stays installed (even fragments of files and other programs) long after the known un-install procedure has been done. The only sure way to clear an infected system would be to re-format the hard drive and then re-install the whole myriad of software and drivers that came out with the PC (most of them are lost during the years necessitating an online search from manufacturer sites and other help sites which may also be infected), losing them is suicide for a PC without proper drivers is like a car without brakes that constantly breaks down and has to try to get itself to run to a level of its former self.