Botnets Can Trample Most Anti-Virus Programs

A new analysis of botnets has come up with a possible reason for their prodigious ability to infect PCs -- many anti-virus programs are near to useless in blocking the binaries used to spread them.

According to FireEye chief scientist Stuart Staniford, detection rates are so poor that, on average, only around 40 percent of security software can detect binaries during the period of greatest infectivity and danger, namely the first few days after a particular variant starts being used by botnet builders.