Antivirus protection worse than a year ago

I suspect professional virus writers don't use any outside services.

They just need several cheap test PC's installed with different anti-virus software. They can test all their creations in house. Nothing needs to go outside.

 

Interesting that you should quote me on that as earlier I said the easy way to test on multiple AV's is to run a bunch of VM's.

 

This happened in the past. Bypassing Symantec, McAfee, Trend and CA was enough to infect a big number of users. IIRC, Stefan Kurtzhals said that malware writers want to bypass all vendors and actually have the tools to do so. It's easy enough to try to bypass big and small vendors with one bullet.

Security through obscurity helps, but I wonder how much. The Zlob folks already have malware for the Macs, most C&C botnet servers run on rooted Linux boxes (lazy and ignorant admins, shame on you) and new malware concepts are developed to bypass HIPS (system debugging, physical memory access, kernel unhooking, etc)