Chalk another one up for "Antiviruses causing more problems than solving them".

They 'worked' when they initially just scanned files for known malicious signatures. Now they're the equivalent of a sledgehammer to a wall with all of the extra bells & whistles strapped to them.

Application whitelisting is the remaining way forward if you actually care about runtime security. That & locking every access point down to the bare minimum.

I would say white listing will have to happen for everything in the near future: applications, ports, URLs (including fragments!), filesystem hierarchies, basically everything.

I'm not sure it's doable with current OS architectures, though.