trojan

I pose this question to you - my readers. In 2008, do we really need antivirus tools anymore?

Mass distributed virus' as we saw them back in the day of the Blaster and similar virus seems to be all off the screen today. Have the virus authors started to write smaller virus that stays below the radar - and thus are not detected by the AV-products? Are they now only targeting special targets - like particular banks, SCADA or singled out corporations? Or countries and causes? Or are they too busy writing malware to care about virus?

Do we really need to pay out on gateway and client AV solutions if there are no virus knocking on the door?

Do you believe that there are no more virus out there? That other threats are taking over and rendering AV-solutions useless?

Is this the whole truth? Or have the AV solutions became so good that they catch everything, even without us noticing?  That they are an absolute critical part of the solution for any entity connected to the net?

I would love your opinion! Please share your thoughts, and I will contribute mine as well ;)

Edit: Followup post: http://www.roer.com/node/417

Dark Reading has a good writeup on BotNets today - very descriptive, and written without all the technical blah-blah. If you ever wanted to understand the hows and the whys of BotNets, this is a very good place to start!