Study: If your antivirus doesn't sniff 'new' malware in 6 days, it never will

Mainstream antivirus software only has small window for detecting and blocking attacks, according to a controversial new study.

Host-based intrusion prevention firm Carbon Black found that if an antivirus package had failed to detect a piece of 'new' (recently discovered) malware within six days of its first being detected by another firm, the chances were it still wouldn't detect the sample even 30 days later. Carbon Black reached the finding after running an experiment assessing the effectiveness of 43 antivirus products in detecting 84 random malware samples using the VirusTotal website.

However David Harley, a senior research fellow at antivirus vendor Eset, said that the study has several methodological drawbacks that he believes make its conclusions potentially misleading.