Antivirus Inventor Says Security Pros are Wasting Time

Slashdot reports that earlier this week Peter Tippett, chief scientist at the ICSA Labs and the inventor of the program that became Norton Antivirus told the attendees of the Computer Forensics Show 2008 that it's time for security professionals to wake up and stop wasting their energy.

Tippett warned that roughly a third of the work security departments do today is a waste of time. He took aim at many of security's current best practices, including vulnerability research/patching, strong passwords, and the product evaluation process.

"If a hacker breaks into the password files of a corporation with 10,000 machines, he only needs to guess one password to penetrate the network," notes Tippett." In that case, the long passwords might mean that he can only crack 2,000 of the passwords instead of 5,000. But what did you really gain by implementing them? He only needed one."

For more on Tippett's presentation, see Dark Reading.