Symantec is poised to turn the tables on malware writers and online criminals by making a big shift from blacklisting the bad stuff to enabling computers to only run trusted applications.
Calling whitelisting the "holy grail of antivirus", Chief Architect of Symantec Research Labs Carey Nachenberg said that the company was now working to create the world's largest, most accurate and most up-to-date whitelisting service by leveraging the reputations of applications derived from its user-base of millions, according to Symantec researchers.
Traditional signatures are becoming increasingly ineffective, and most have a useful lifetime of only about two weeks...Even classic heuristics were largely ineffective since all an attacker needed to do was to tweak their new threat until the heuristics could no longer detect it.
If successful, Symantec may be able to spearhead a shift in countering malware from blacklisting to a whitelisting model for desktops and servers...
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Symantec plans new AV strategy
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