The scientists say such ubiquitous PC software could soon become obsolete because of a "cloud computing" approach to malicious software detection developed at the University of Michigan. Cloud computing refers to applications and services provided seamlessly on the Internet.

Traditional anti-virus software is installed on millions of individual computers around the world, but the scientists say such programs are becoming increasingly ineffective.

The researchers' new approach is called CloudAV.

"CloudAV virtualizes and parallelizes detection functionality with multiple anti-virus engines, significantly increasing overall protection," said Professor Farnam Jahanian, whose team developed the software.

The researchers said CloudAV supports a large number of malicious software detectors that act in parallel to analyze a single incoming file. Each detector operates in its own virtual machine, so there are no technical incompatibilities or security issues.

CloudAV also caches analysis results, the scientists said, speeding up the process compared with traditional anti-virus software. That, they noted, might be useful in workplaces where multiple employees access the same documents.

More CloudAV information is available at http://www.eecs.umich.edu/fjgroup/cloudav/.