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The Insecurity of Security Software
H316 writes "BusinessWeek is reporting that, despite a number of software products meant to safeguard Windows PCs from harm, a rising number of them endanger their hosts because of poor design and flaws. From the article: 'A new Yankee Group report, to be released June 20, shows the number of vulnerabilities found in security products increasing sharply for the third straight year -- and for the first time surpassing those found in all Microsoft products.'"
Windows seems to be responsible for that 40 million credit card breach:
a rd=1600684464&tid=cald _ 0410. pdf5 ,63.83.95.0,63.83.95.255
/ /mastercard.com
posted originally at groklaw:
All of the marketing hype in the world cannot make Micro$oft a better system
http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?action=m&bo
&sid=1600684464&mid=274625
A Tucson Arizona credit card processor has been implicated in a security breach
which resulted in fraudlent charges and the exposure of 40 MM accounts.
CardSystems Solutions has helpfully posted a Computer Operator job listing. This
makes it clear that the system breached was running M$ OS.
www.cardsystems.com/careers/ComputerOperator
A seperate database developer job posting has a VBScript experience requirement,
leading to the presumption that VBScripts were at the heart of the card
processors data management.
A quality assurance job posting required experience in Windows NT and Windows
2000. Using these obsolete systems was part of the innovative "security
through obscurity" policy of the part of the card processors.
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/netblock?q=UU-63-83-9
3330975
www.cardsystems.com
CardSystems Solutions, Inc., 6390 East Broadway, Tucson, 85710, United
States April 1997
Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Windows 2000
Mastercard is running Apache on Solaris
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:
Mastercard International
2200 MasterCard Blvd OFallon MO US 63366
Solaris 8 Apache/1.3.27 Unix mod_ssl/2.8.12 OpenSSL/0.9.7
mod_perl/1.27 29-Jul-2003
Was Mastercard to blame running a decent OS
Or was CardSystems to blame for running Micro$oft crapware.
We've been running AVG for the past 3 years and it is a perfect solution for people looking to actually have a virus protection system that works.
www.grisoft.com
It will find a LOT of viruses/trojans etc that the 'big' software won't and is completely free for personal use (including updates, no subscriptions etc).
AVG is one of the 3 main applications (along with zonealarm & firefox) that get put down on any machine that i'm called in 'to fix' - which happens on a weekly basis...average people think that because their computer came with norton or macafee that they should use it, but these programs do nothing but give a false sense of security, take up significant processor & memory resources and are basically useless in actually finding or preventing viruses etc from getting onto their machines.
Gekido's Lair
I wonder, has anyone ever investigated, researched, done any benchmarks about how many/what percentage of CPU cylces are allocated just for virus checking (and other security checks)?
Realtime virus scans are triggered whenever an application is launched. It literally runs the application in an virtualized sandbox for a designated number of cycles while scanning the memory for heuristic patterns of virus behavior. After the designated time the checker gives up and no longer analyzes the running application.
I will let you imagine the implications of this approach regarding security.
But because this happens so infrequently the performance impact is negligible.
The only way to see if a virus is running in memory is to scan the memory. The only way to do this safely to kill it is to run it in a virtual sandbox. If everyone's computers ran dog slow they'd just turn off virus scanning. This is a compromise, but be sure to keep in mind what is compromised. It only keeps out the amatuers!