Netflix Dumping Antivirus

Huh:

Anti-virus has been the first line of defence for many firms over the last quarter of a century. Generally speaking, AV relies on malware signatures and behavioural analysis to uncover threats to people’s PCs and smartphones. But in the last 10 years, research has indicated AV is rarely successful in detecting smart malware. In 2014, Lastline Labs discovered only 51 per cent of AV scanners were able to detect new malware samples.

Despite its shortcomings, many are still required to keep hold of their AV product because they’re required to by compliance laws, in particular PCI DSS, the regulation covering payment card protections. There’s also the argument that AV is necessary to pick up the “background noise”, as Quocirca analyst Bob Tarzey describes it. “Despite more and more targeted attacks, random viruses are still rife and traditional AV is still good at dealing with these,” he claims. Major players, including Symantec SYMC +0.00% and Kaspersky, continue to make significant sums, even if results aren’t stellar.

But it’s now possible to dump anti-virus altogether, and Netflix is about to prove it. The firm has found a vendor that covers those compliance demands in the form of SentinelOne. As SentinelOne CEO Tomer Weingarten told me, his firm was given third-party certification from the independent AV-TEST Institute, validating it can do just what anti-virus does in terms of protecting against known threats, whilst providing “an additional new layer of advanced threat protection”.

Netflix moves more bits than just about anybody — certainly in the consumer space. If they’re willing to trust their data protection to something new, then it might just be time to get rid of the old.