Antivirus Software: Fighting Blame, Not Hacks

Craig Elliott, chief executive officer of Pertino, a cloud-networking startup, knows that the antivirus software his company uses won’t deter all hacking attacks. That won’t stop him from using it. “It’s a safety blanket,” he says. “It’s CYA [cover your ass] more than anything else.” That’s why the antivirus industry, born in the late 1980s to combat floppy-disk viruses, has staying power, even in this era of sophisticated hacks from China and elsewhere.

Although the word virus generally applies to all manner of computer attacks, data security pros no longer just worry about old-style viruses—programs or pieces of code that replicate and spread from computer to computer, degrading their performance. The new threat: advanced forms of malicious software, or malware, such as online banking password-stealers and military-grade spying software.