The antivirus (AV) functionality is either disabled or missing in about 25 percent of PCs running AV software, according to the security vendor Promisec [1]. The company says the findings come from studying more than 100,000 computers from a range of industries.

In many cases, the antivirus management consoles from leading AV software companies were not accurately reporting when endpoint software wasn’t working, according to the study. Sometimes users had turned off the software in hopes of boosting their computers’ speed. Other times the software was never deployed to individual PCs. Israel-based Promisec provides a service that detects threats without placing antimalware agents on individual computers.