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Symantec Will Not Detect Magic Lantern
An anonymous reader contributes: "In this article on Declan McCullagh's Politech, Symantec chief researcher Eric Chien stated that provided a hypothetical keystroke logging tool was used only by the FBI, Symantec would avoid updating its antivirus tools to detect such a Trojan, echoing a similar stance Network Associates allegedly took with its McAfee anti-virus software earlier this week. 'If it was under the control of the FBI, with appropriate technical safeguards in place to prevent possible misuse, and nobody else used it -- we wouldn't detect it,' said Chien. 'However we would detect modified versions that might be used by hackers.'"
I'd rather not use AV software that was designed not to work. Of course, I run Linux so it's not really an issure for me...
this is getting old and so are you
blog
Anyway, I don't use Windows, so this is not my problem. Ask yourself; is it really yours? :-)
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
I'm not a conspiracy nut, and I certainly don't have total trust, or total mistrust, of the government either.
But it isn't the idea of the FBI trying to use these tools that offends me. I expect them too, and I don't have anything to hide. But the issue of a company that I pay money for to help protect me to turn a blind eye to government intrusion is insane.
If I pay someone to give me security, I expect them to provide it against anyone who wants my information. Pure and simple. And I'm not worried about the "Oh, we won't check the FBI's version - but we would check variants."
Oh, that makes me feel *much* better. Imagine a cracker getting his fingers on the FBI software and using that on my systems. Gee, thanks for not checking that, Symantec.
Of course, you have to admit that Symantec and McAfee are in a bind. If they state they're going to detect the FBI software, then they're anti-government. If they don't, then they're aiding big brother. But considering that the United States was formed from a healthy distrust of our government (and that distrust has only proved to help us, thank you Hubert Hoover and your bra collection), I would rather have the security companies on my side and make my government work just a little harder to prove guilt. Or at least, that's what my tax dollars should be going to.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
So they're not going to detect the original, but they WILL detect any hacker-modified clones?
What about Norton Firewall? Will it still detect unexpected outgoing connections? How can I expect it to reliably detect and permit FBI-approved software, but not hacker software with a similar MO?
Oh, maybe there'll be a hard-coded IP address in the outgoing connection -- now THERE'S a nice target for DDOS!
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
From the time a copy of this "Magic Lantern" is first discovered in the wild until an exact copy of the FBI-approved (and consequently undetectable) version is available via alt.hackers.maliscious is going to take what, twenty minutes?
Malda might as well start composing (and spellchecking) the headline now, because it's a sure bet he'll get to use it.
The FBI? Do anything illegal? Who would ever imagine that such a thing could happen?
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Hmmm, I can't seem to think of any examples of how police spy powers have been abused in the past, can you?
Symantec are perfectly entitled to do whatever they want. If they want to sell crippled security software, it's their funeral ? Sophos has a more sensible attitude http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/23057.html , and better AV software anyway.
If US software companies want to sell crippleware in the interests of "patriotism" that's their business. There are plenty of companies willing to fill the gap.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
How long until this little app ends up on a PC that is not on US soil? Will some foreign nation be able to make an offical-issue of this? It seems like the FBI might not be thinking this through.
... then again, there is Echelon.... apparently no one minds...
Not to mention what happened the last time the FBI decided to abuse it's powers in blatant and utter disregard for the consitutionally guaranteed rights of the American people.
COINTELPRO
And this time we're GIVING the government this power by agreeing to be spoon-fed this 'for our own good' and 'war on terrorism' bullshit.
I say no thank you. If there was a tracking device installed subcutaneously on every single American citizen in the country, and our borders were closed, THEN would you people feel safe?
El riesgo vive siempre!
Assuming that this is a standardized attachment (ie the same size, etc.) it should be pretty easy for filters on the ISP or client to catch. Also, to my knowledge the only mail clients that can execute code w/o user intervention are M$ products. This narrows the people that can be affected alot.
Your analogy is, unfortunately, incomplete. Let's review:
In such a case, the following is expected to happen:
Now, in the case of Magic Lantern, the following *might* happen:
So, what's missing here? Simply enough, the agents did not have the consent of the court to infect your computer, and you've been deprived of the knowledge of what occured. This is the major issue here. I wouldn't want them poking inside my computers as much as the next guy, but if they're going to, I'd like to know when they're doing it, and they better have that bloody warrant in hand.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
I like to program but I'm not a huge trojan nut but have the basic concept and idea on how these things work....
First off:
Everyone keeps talking about how it will just be a matter of time before a wild version of "green lantern" or something of the sort shows up in the wild....
Dude, if you have Green Lantern on your computer and you find out about it, you've got a lot more things to worry about then sharing it with the hacker / cracker community!
Second of all:
Who cares that the anti-virus software won't recognize it. They haven't detected half the viruses for years!
Heck, Just create your basic client server in c++ or whatever and you'll notice that it is not recognized by the software anyways..... I started to learn sockets and create client/server chats, remote access for work, etc. My anti-virus, anti-trojan software never picked up on it... only my Zone Alarm caught it.
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
These companies provide detection and removal services for widely-distributed and automatic attacks. That is to say, it's their job to clean up when someone releases a virus that spreads all over the place. They discover something spreading, and they make an update.
If the FBI is doing their job well, that's not the situation here. The way they've been describing this working is that they set it up to attack the particular person against whom they've obtained a warrent. It doesn't email itself to the target's addressbook, it doesn't attack random IPs, it doesn't try to infect floppies. That would be both illegal (since it could destroy the data of non-targets) and probably invalidate their evidence (since they don't have a warrent to investigate every individual in the US).
So a virus scanner shouldn't catch Magic Lantern, because it's not really a virus, in the sense that they're scanning for. It's an attack tool, which uses the methods often employed by viruses. Virus scanners don't fix security holes; they look for particular malicious and spreading code on your computer and clean it up. They won't stop Magic Lantern, they won't stop someone hijacking your passport account, and they won't stop even script kiddies breaking into your webserver, because their purpose and system design just aren't good for that.
So far I haven't heard of any IDS companies saying they will ignore ML, nor have I heard of any companies saying they won't fix security holes that ML uses. That's what would be significant.
I just wonder how a free software anti-virus lab would work
Easy- we fix the problem instead of treating the symptoms:
If there are exploits, they get fixed. So you would never have to worry about an email or webpage hijacking your machine.
And so long as you stick to source-available code (not necessarily the same as open-source) which has at least a moderate distribution, you dont have to worry about trojans.
The run-away virus problems you see in windows are a direct result of a closed source culture where all software is delivered and exchanged via inscrutable black-box binaries. A typical windows user thinks nothing of downloading a .exe file from an untrusted source then running it, whereas a typical unix user would get shivers just at the thought of doing so.
Virus scanner software is just a huge patchwork of duct tape that is fundamentally incapable of solving any problem- or providing any security.
(for example nimda: it had already done its damage by the time it was in the pattern files)
If an open-source system and philosophy were ta take hold of the desktop- an entire industry (virus scanning/recovery) would simply disappear.
A few things happened in the Microsoft world that made it pretty easy for viruses to spread that could not happen in the Linux world.
1) most people don't read their email while logged in as root. This is the number 1 reason why viruses easily spread in Windows systems is because in Windows, just about everything is done with an account that has full control over the system.
2) In Windows-land you generally run binary-only programs and you have no idea what the source looks like. Most programs in Linux come with the source code. You are not likely to run a binary only program in Linux unless you know for sure who its coming from.
So, to reiterate, viruses are executable programs. They need both permission to execute and a means of spreading themselves. Windows systems were already set up to allow these things to happen by default. Linux systems will never be set up that way, at least not on a widespread basis.
I don't think we will ever see problems as widespread and damaging such as Nimda or Sircam on Linux systems, no matter how popular Linux gets. Its just not designed to easily allow programs to be run, without someone explicity giving it permission. Even exploits of commonly used server programs are limited in the damage they can do, because most servers do not run as root. No, the virus writer has a much much harder job to do on Unix systems. Why bother when Windows is so much easier?
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Would it be possible for Magic Lantern to be built into a closed source OS like Windows XP?