AntiVirus In Dread is the theme for this latest AVID column. (For the stray reader who may have stumbled on this posting by accident, AVID is an acronym for AntiVirus Is Dead, my ongoing campaign to bring down the AV industry, whose products are so lamentably ineffective).

The AV companies are now dreading the proliferation of Vista for obvious reasons. AV technology offers scant protection against viruses which, in a world that’s dominated by versions of pre-Vista Windows, is awash in viruses. However, nothing convinces the sorry buyers of AV technology to waste their money on ineffective AV products than stories of one virus or another giving someone, somewhere a bad time.

Unfortunately a few weeks ago, Jim Allchin of Microsoft implied, in a comment about his 7 year old son, that Vista would be pretty much immune to viruses. And indeed it will, if you configure it correctly, because you can lock down the environment. It will then ask you to confirm the validity of any spurious executable that tries to run. Just to make it plain, apart from ‘lock down’ there’s nothing magical about Vista that stops viruses from running, although Microsoft has put in a neat memory mapping feature that is likely to make virus proliferation more difficult to achieve.

On the day of the Vista launch, Sophos released a statement, which claimed that vari-ants of W32/Stration, W32/Mydoom and W32/Netsky were still capable of running under Vista (in other words Vista stopped some viruses dead in their tracks but didn’t stop them all). Microsoft responded saying that rather than exploiting the operating system, these threats had used social engineering to trick users into letting them run.

But actually that’s a vulnerability in all operating systems. If you can trick someone into allowing malware to run, then it will run. The way that Vista works is not so different from the way the Mac works and the Mac has no significant virus problems. In truth, Microsoft should have added the lock down feature long ago. If it had, then the virus population of the Internet would be much lower.

This feature is, after all, the first step in the implementation of viable software authentication, which is what vendors like SecureWave, Savant Protection, AppSense and Bit9 provide. Businesses that use such software do not have malware problems.

So the question arises as to whether the AV technology vendors will go the way of the Dodo when Vista proliferates (despite the fact that Jim Allchin, in a fit of charity to AV companies, has stepped back from suggesting that Vista needs no AV). This is indeed quite possible. As legacy Windows PCs are retired the prevalence of viruses should diminish.

There will still be problems, especially from new security exploits and from hackers that use social engineering to barge their way in to the corporate network. And it is worth pointing out here that viruses themselves can attempt social engineering tactics to get a foothold. However, such security issues will be dealt with far more effec-tively by the vendors of software authentication products (SecureWave, Savant Protec-tion, AppSense and Bit9). The future belongs to them.