RSA 2013 San Francisco - Where the World Talks Security

The RSA 2013 San Francisco security trade show  takes place  at Moscone Center February 25 through March 1.  “Where the World Talks Security” is the theme of this year’s show.  http://www.rsaconference.com/events/2013/usa/index.htm

 

Near the bottom of this blog is information on getting a free RSA  pass (exhibition hall) from Ahnlab, Zscaler, or Sophos.

The show has grown in size, with over 350 companies exhibiting.  The exhibition hall area will be open Tuesday through Thursday from 11am to 6pm (3pm on Thursday) for individuals with a full conference pass; there will be 275 different sessions to attend across 22 tracks.  Threats are evolving.  The cyber criminals are getting more creative. 

Up until several years ago, if you said “APT”, the brightest people in the room would say, “Advanced Placement Test.”  Now they are saying, “Advanced Persistent Threat.”  A number of security pundits are saying that traditional defenses are ineffective against today’s more sophisticated threats.  Here is your chance to learn about what companies are doing to protect individuals and companies against these. 

A number of security vendors may not have booths.  Look for stealthy meetings to be held at the bar area at the W Hotel, and way too many luncheons to at the Thirsty Bear Brewery on Howard street.  Some stealthy meetings may be held as far away as the Clift Hotel. 

For those just going for the exhibits, a great number of vendors always have   presentation theatres in their booth areas.  These can be quite educational, as well.  Exhibition pass holders are able to attend the keynotes Tuesday through Friday, I believe.  There are a number of keynote addresses at RSA 2013.  The final keynote this year will be 66^th Secretary of the United States, Condoleezza Rice, on Friday afternoon.   Go to the RSA site to learn about what talks are being give, and who the other keynote speakers are. 

Thursday is the least crowded day in the Exhibition Hall, as vendors will go through the ceremonial exchanging of the tchotchkes with other vendors.  Before going on your own personal tchotchke run, ask yourself, “Do I really need another 15 trade show tee shirts?”  If you do not attend on Tuesday, you will miss the libations being served during the last hour on the first day the exhibition hall is open.

Sponsors for this Year’s RSA 2013 San Francisco

Global Diamond Sponsors – Microsoft, Symantec, and RSA.  Global Platinum Sponsors, Akamai, and Qualys, Global Gold Sponsors – FireEye, splunk, and SafeNet, Platinum Sponsors – Cisco, McAfee, HP, and TrustWave.  There are also Gold and Silver sponsor levels as well.  Visit their booths. Travel the perimeter to view products from companies who lack the budget of the larger companies, may just be starting out, but may also have great products.    

This is your chance to attend a talk by a smaller vendor, then go to a larger vendor and ask, “Can you do A, B, and C?  This smaller vendor can.”    Asking a larger vendor why their products didn’t test as well on the tests performed by  www.virusbtn.com , www.AV-Test.org   and www.AV-comparatives.org  will not get you to the front of the line for any booth giveaways.  At the show, you may be able to view products that range from not so hot, to avg,  to pretty incredible.

Award Events Not Affiliated with RSA But Being Held That Week

SC Magazine will be presenting their SC Awards 2013 Reader Trust, Excellence, and Professional Awards   at a dinner on February 26. There are  over 34 categories this year.  To see a list of some of the finalists, go to http://kensek.blogspot.com/2012/02/sc-magazine-awards-2012-winners_29.html

 

Info Security Products Guide will be presenting their 2013 Global Industry excellence awards at a dinner on February 27.  To see a list   of the finalists for this award, go to http://www.infosecurityproductsguide.com/excellence/index.html

 

For the recipients of either these awards - Bragging rights, Product and company recognition, Marketing and promotion opportunities, Logos for their web site.  With a fair degree of certainty,  rest assured that those who have won the previous year but not this year, will not quickly be removing their logos from the web.   sites.

Free Pass – RSA 2013 San Francisco

Entering FXE13AHN at the link below will get you a free RSA 2013 exhibition hall pass.  Stop by the Ahnlab booth, learn about APTs, and tell Ahnlab  thank you.  FX13SPH at the link below will get you a free RSA  2013 exhibition hall pass.  Stop by the Sophos booth and tell them thank you.  As will FXE13ZSC.  Stop by the Zscaler booth and tell them thank you. Expires February 22.

Register: https://ae.rsaconference.com/US13/portal/newreg.ww

OPSWAT Market Share Report - Antivirus Market Analysis: December 2012

OPSWAT Inc. has released their December 2012 market share report, “Antivirus Market Analysis: December 2012”.  The data OPSWAT used for this market share report was collected between November 16, 2011 and November 15, 2012.  It's worthwhile to check out the detailed report.  You can also learn more about OPSWAT, their reports, products and some free tools they have available.  (To be discussed on another blog).  One aspect of this market share report is that it doesn’t go into the market shares these vendors have on tablets (and smart phones).  This will become increasingly more relevant in 2013.   

A Global Analysis

Avast has to be happy.  They’re the global market share leader, though Microsoft is catching up.  They maintain nice leads over the other well-known freemium antivirus vendors, Avira and AVG Technologies.  AVG Technologies may not care as much since their    revenue stream  from Google and Yahoo will become increasingly more important (a separate discussion).  In some respects, the below isn’t great for Kaspersky since one of their corporate objectives is to surpass Trend Micro in total revenues. 

OPSWAT Market Share Report Top Five  

The Top Five in antivirus vendor market share were Avast (17.5%), Microsoft (16.8%), ESET (10.8%), Symantec (10.5%), and Avira (10.4%).     

Congratulations to the Top Five!  Largest market share loss, AVG Technologies at 1.3%.  AVG has been getting a lot of downloads of their free  (and paid) products running on Android, however.   This product came from their acquisition of DroidSecurity.  DroidSecurity (was first and the market leader)  had over 2.5 million downloads of their products prior to the 2010 acquisition. Avira, Avast, and Norton also offer free Android solutions.

http://kensek.blogspot.com/2012/12/avg-updates-its-antivirus-for-android.html

 

You can click on the above to enlarge it.

In the September report, the order of the Top Five vendors:  Avast, Microsoft, Avira, and AVG Technologies.

Avast had cancelled an IPO in late July.  You have to wonder when that will take place.  http://kensek.blogspot.com/2012/07/avast-to-have-their-initial-public.html

A North America Centric View

Microsoft has a pretty incredible 32.0% share, gaining 10%.  The others in the Top Five in order, Symantec, Avast, AVG Technologies, and ESET.  Largest loss, AVG Technologies at 1.7%.  Symantec and Avast achieved small gains in share of 0.6% and 0.8%, respectively.  Microsoft has quickly become the 800-pound gorilla in Antivirus and Free Antivirus marketshare.

You can click on the above to enlarge it.

But How Well Do These Products Perform in third Party Testing?

That’s always an important question.  In AV-Comparatives September Anti-Virus Comparative “File Detection Test of Malicious Software”, the top five products overall were from,  in order Avira, Trend Micro, F-Secure, Kaspersky, and Bitdefender.  ESET was 15^th, Microsoft was 17^th .Symantec hasn’t been part of 2012 testing (they wanted to pick and choose tests to participate in. )

 http://kensek.blogspot.com/2012/10/av-comparatives-file-detection-test-of.html

All of the December top five with the exception of Microsoft (didn’t participate) received October VB100 Awards.  http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archive/summary
 

What about Correlation with 3rd Party Real World Dynamic Testing?

The short answer, there’s no correlation.  From the  December AV-Comparatives “Whole Product Dynamic ‘Real World’ Protection Test",  Avira (8^th) Avast (9^th) and ESET (11^th), all received two stars, while BitDefender, G Data, Qihoo, Kaspersky and BullGuard all received three stars.

An issue for all these products is product churn.  Free competitive upgrades are often available.  With free products, switching costs to another free product is zero.  On www.download.com at CNET, Avast had 1.39 million downloads for the week  ending December 9, while AVG had 0.97 million downloads.  Annualizing these come to about 52 million downloads each. Major churn "has" to be occurring, or a product is downloaded to fix a problem an already installed product missed, and then removed.   

About OPSWAT www.opswat.com   

Founded in 2002, OPSWAT is the industry leader in software management SDKs, interoperability certification, and multiple-engine scanning solutions.

OPSWAT market share reports are available at http://www.opswat.com/media/reports   

About AV-Comparatives.org   

AV-Comparatives is an Austrian Non-Profit-Organization, which provides independent Anti-Virus software tests free to the public.  www.av-comparatives.org

 

NSS Releases AV/EPP Comparative Analysis Report

NSS Labs  has released an AV/EPP Comparative Analysis of thirteen vendors products (Endpoint Protection Product).  The vendors in the analysis include Avast, AVG Technologies, Avira, ESET, F-Secure, Kaspersky, McAfee, Microsoft, Norman, Norton, Panda, Total Defense, and Trend Micro.  

This is an interesting report.  The only downside is that many of the products  are 2012 releases.  The goal of this eleven-page report was to test these vendors endpoint security suites (no free products other than Microsoft’s) effectiveness in protecting Windows computers against exploits. 

According  to  NSS, all the vulnerabilities exploited during the test have been publicly available for months (and years, even).  Tests included:

• HTTP Evasion & Compression
• HTML Obfuscation
• Payload Encoding
• File Compressors (download)
• Executable Packers (download)
• Executable Packers (execute)
• Layered Evasions

 Only three companies had an overall score of over 90% with Microsoft scoring the only 100%. The others over 90% were ESET and Kaspersky.  The highest score from a “free” vendor was Avira with 89%.  Again, this was their Internet Security suite.  Hall of Shame vendors trailing the others with 71%;  F-Secure, Total Defense, and Trend Micro. 

Eight vendors had a File Compression Block Rate of 0%.  Ouch.  NSS felt that the issue had to do with products allowing the download of compressed payloads without checking the content.  The other problem was with Executable Packers (download) with only five vendors scoring 100%.  NSS pointed out in the report  that most current browsers help block some malicious downloads.  Also, a default configuration that doesn’t inspect compressed downloads is one of those tradeoff things between performance and security.  Companies would never choose the default to be in favor of performance, though ;).

This report is well worth downloading.  People may also want to look at the NSS 2012 Exploit Protection Comparative Analysis Report.

As always, you can’t judge the quality of an internet security suite by the number of Facebook fans the vendor has nor by the number of likes on the vendor’s Facebook fan page. 

To learn more about NSS Labs, go to www.nsslabs.com

September 2012 OPSWAT Report on Worldwide Security Industry Market Share Analysis

OPSWAT Inc. has released their September 2012 report, “Security Industry Market Share Analysis”.  The data OPSWAT used was collected between August 16, 2011 and August 15, 2012.  It's worthwhile to check out the detailed report.  You can also learn more about OPSWAT, their reports, products and some free tools they have available.

There were some  changes in the order of the top five in the September Market Share Analysis.  Avira regained a position in the top five while AVG Technologies dropped out.  Globally, over the last six months, AVG Technologies had the largest loss in market share with about 1.4% (note, a company can gain in seats and still lose market share), and Avira the largest gain, with just fewer than 2%.  A couple of nice graphics illustrate market share and gain/loss for both the Global and North Americamarkets.  The detailed report has a listing of the top 10.  These top 10 have 89% of the market, according to OPSWAT.

Antivirus Worldwide Vendor Market Share September – OPSWAT

1. 17.5% - Avast
2. 13.9% - Microsoft
3. 12.1% - Avira
4. 10.6% - Eset
5. 10.2% - AVG Technologies

Antivirus Worldwide Vendor Market Share June 2012 - OPSWAT

1. 17.4% - Avast
2. 13.2% - Microsoft
3. 11.1% - Eset
4. 10.3% - Symantec
5. 10.1% - AVG Technologies

AV Products Worldwide Market Share

Avast and Microsoft were first and second with respect to global market share with 13.8% and 13.6%, respectively.  Avira was 3rd with 10%.  As with the other lists, OPWSWAT lists the top ten.  The top ten had 81% of the market.

North America Vendor Share

Microsoft led   the other vendors    with respect to market share at 26.7%.  Symantec was second at 15.7% and Avast 3rd at 11.1%.  The top 10 vendors have 89.5% of the market in North America.

There has to be a story behind Avast cancelling their initial public offering since they continue to be in a leading position among the three A’s, AVG Technologies, Avast, and Avira,  when it comes to market share.  Note that this is defined as installed base, not revenue. 

The cone of shame for that timeframe from the bottom up was from Ahnlab, Webroot, and PC Tools.

The major players are in the process of running out their Antivirus 2013 and Internet Security 2013 suites.  Depending on how these are received, the order may be changing over time.

Antivirus Usage, Real Time Protection, System Scan and Updates

Opswat also provides some interesting data on the major vendors from the perspective of – percentage of those with Real Time Protection (RTP) enabled (Microsoft Wins), Average Time since Last Definition Update (Microsoft) and Average Time since Last Full System Scan (Microsoft).  Where this data is somewhat funky is that users can define when they want a full system scan, for example. 

But Wait, There’s More!  Operating Systems Share

Windows 7 has 51.9% of the worldwide market, and 46.6% of the North America Market.  See the report.  Windows XP is just under 39% in both cases. 

But Wait, There’s More!  OPSWAT Products

Read the report for blurbs on the OESIS Framwork, AppRemover, Multi-Scanning solutions, the GEARS cloud-based endpoint management and monitoring solution, and the Secure Virtual Desktop (SVD).

AV¬-Comparative Testing 

The market   share leaders aren’t always the top rated ones in testing.  From the AV-Comparative March through June 2012 report, “Whole Product Dynamic ‘Real World’ Protection Test, for example,  the top five products were from    BitDefender, G Data, Kaspersky Qihoo, and F-Secure.  The June through August online graphic has the order as Kaspersky, QiHoo, BitDefender, Avira, and F-Secure. 

About OPSWAT  www.opswat.com  

Founded in 2002, OPSWAT is the industry leader in software management SDKs, interoperability certification, and multiple-engine scanning solutions. 

OPSWAT market share reports are available at http://www.opswat.com/media/reports  

AV-Comparatives.org

AV-Comparatives is an Austrian Non-Profit-Organization, which provides independent Anti-Virus software tests free to the public.  www.av-comparatives.org