I did find your analogy humerous...poop and fart jokes will always make me laugh due to the 12 year old living in my brain.
it was just as fun to write, believe me...
I wouldn't say that the backlog is EQUIVALENT to the number of people getting hit with undetected malware, but your own arguement pretty much does point out that there is a correllation.
A causes B, but the presence of B does not imply A... a backlog would cause the number of incidents to grow but it's not the only thing that causes the number of incidents to grow so a backlog cannot be inferred by incident growth...
If there is a backlog, which I'm pretty sure that everyone would agree there always will be, there will be undetected malware infecting "protected" systems.
this can happen without a backlog and not everyone would agree that there will always be a backlog... a backlog is not simply the set of malware that hasn't yet been analyzed... a backlog is the result of the difference between the malware production rate and the malware analysis rate (assuming such a difference exists)...
the set of as yet undetected malware is not by itself an indicator that such a difference exists as there must always be a period of time during which something newly created is unknown to others... futher, the growth of that set is also not an indication that such a difference exists, rather it is merely an indication that the malware production rate has increased (which we already knew from the malware submission rate)...
Of course having AV is better than not, but surely you can see how if a company hires more people (as you pointed out) to reduce the backlog of unknown threats, those threats will then be known and hence avoided. It is a never-ending, viscious cycle, but one that should be approached with a fervor by anyone purporting to sell a product that will protect their clients.
this is the cost of compiling any list of things that increase in number... it's the same with compiling a list of known good programs (with the exception that the list of good programs is orders of magnitude larger and growing faster)...
My initial attack/fun-poking was a bit unjustified, but again, really all in fun. I have since gone back and read more of your blog. Your issue for McAfee for selling "Total Protection" when there obviously is no such thing, is really the problem that I have with so many security companies. A problem that leads to very many companies, and even more home users, having a false sense of security.
exactly agreed... that's why i call it snake oil...
Opinions : The greatest Hackers?
