The founder and current CTO of BT Counterpane told US-based IDG News Service at Infosecurity in London that antivirus products actually work but offered a range of controversial opinions on other matters.
“(Antivirus products) have for years,” he said. “A lot of the software on this show floor is just snake oil, but antivirus does work. You should have an antivirus program and you should have it updated regularly. It doesn’t make you secure, but it gets that bottom layer of the trivial stuff. That’s why.”
Schneier also talked about what he considered the biggest threat right now, crime.
“It might not be fixable,” he said. “A lot of the solution is going to be making the things that criminals are going after harder to get. You’re not going to stop the criminals.”
Schneier emphasized that a lot of it is looking at how the criminals are attacking things and making it harder to attack them.
Schneier also talked about people believing what they see on the Net because of the trappings of reality. He compared it to going to a local bank and seeing the logo and the tellers.
“So when you do to BT.com, you see the BT logo, the BT font, the PR material and you’ll think, yeah it’s BT,” he said. “On the web, it could be a fake BT.com site and you don’t notice because it’s trivially easy to copy.”
According to Schneier, all the social cues get users to trust something, it looks professional, nothing misspelled and he said, “you see those things and you believe it’s real. People are conditioned to accept it but it’s from a whole variety of social conditioning.”
Schneier’s bestsellers include Applied Cryptography which explained how the arcane science of secret codes actually works and his book on computer and network security, Secrets and Lies, was followed by his current book, Beyond Fear, which tackles the problems of security from the small to the large, personal safety, crime, corporate security and national security.