avast! CEO says antivirus is not dead !

Well it sounds odd enough to see antivirus products die soon. But Symantec's new business strategy which appeared in Wall Street Journal, said that antivirus products are becoming useless and there is a huge need to create new technologies to avoid hackers and other threats. The CEO of avast!,Vince Steckler said that antivirus products are not dead and they won't die any soon as it evolves with time to keep up with all threats. Here is what he said in full :

Symantec’s statement seems to relate to the enterprise, and not the consumer and small business. Enterprises have traditionally relied on many layers of defense and antivirus is one of those layers. Antivirus though is a broad-spectrum defense and as such is often complemented by other products, such as those protecting against targeted attacks that enterprises worry about.
In the consumer and SMB space, the situation is quite different: customers typically do not have multiple layers of protection. They have one, their AV product.
These products though are not the simple AV products of past years. The true statement in the story is that consumer security is so much broader than AV. AV is used as a generic name as it is what customers know. They instead incorporate firewalls, intrusion detection, heuristics, virtualization, sandboxes, and many other layers of protection and not just antivirus. Therefore, we believe AV is not dead in the consumer space. It is far from dead there.

That it is true, today's antivirus products bring more than what the basic antivirus gives, current generation antivirus products include multiple layers to protect users such as Firewall,Anti-Spam, intrusion detection, heuristics, virtualization, sandboxes, and many other technologies. For an normal consumer, that's more than enough because he is not going to targeted by the top class hackers out there. May be the enterprise sector needs some new techniques to keep away hackers at the bay and protect the data. I think that is more than enough to justify antivirus are not dead. 

Keep your antivirus software updated and make sure that your license is active if not renew it immediately or consider switching to free antivirus solution such as avast! free antivirus, AVG Free antivius , Avira free antivirus.... I personally recommend avast! free antivirus as it offers multiple layers of protection for free and it's pretty light too.