I've been reviewing, testing and comparing anti-virus software for several years now and have come to a conclusion that anti-virus programs fail more often than they succeed in protecting you from bad things on the Internet. Our testing showed more than half of the active threats on the Internet routinely go undetected.
The first serious book about spam and spammers that he read was Spam Kings by Brian S. McWilliams in 2004. In this, the 'pioneers' of the email spam industry ran their businesses in a small family way. Relying on nothing more than help from their relatives, they handled the entire process chain themselves: harvesting email addresses, authoring message content, sending bulk emails, processing orders, rapidly switching their Internet service providers and, at a later stage, running from the FBI or being jailed. Since then, many countries have established anti-spam laws governing the use of email communications and marketing. While legislation was not expected to eliminate spam and make spammers extinct, it did criminalize their activities, making them a punishable offence and as a result a much riskier endeavor to engage in.
In testing McAfee's SiteAdvisor and Symantec's Norton SafeWeb, we found that these two popular consumer Web site health checking tools only blocked or warned against malicious sites 43% and 4% of the time, respectively. That suggests the new generation of antivirus protection just entering the market can't get here fast enough.
Cyber criminals have become more adept, operating globally and leveraging worldwide resources in order to evade enforcement efforts. With the influx of increasingly sophisticated attacks and social networking sites as targets, antivirus engines are finding it difficult to keep up with and protect against morphing malicious attacks. No matter which anti-virus software you use and how often it's updated, you are never 100% safe. Not even 50%.