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Can the Malware Industry be Trusted?
Joe Barr writes "Is the entire anti-virus / malware industry as rotten as it appears? I started digging into it as a result of the recent lame, unsubstantiated assertions of viral threats to Linux by Kaspersky Lab, but the practice doesn't seem to start or end with them. Who knows, maybe it's pandemic in that entire segment of the IT industry."
An industry blowing problems up to be bigger than they seem in order to sell more product? Conspiracy!
The only real crime here is that we've let ourselves be suckered by them for as long as we have.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Surely they mean the anti-malware industry?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
If this guy doesn't know that Symantec == Norton, I don't think I have any use for his opinions on malware companies.
Specialization is for insects. -Heinlein
If you assume that every person is motivated by money alone, then you are forced to conclude that anti-malware companies have the greatest incentive to produce malware.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Agree or disagree with the points of this article (I mostly agree), there is an elephant in the middle of the room everyone ignores.
From the article (emphasis mine):
"Only the stupidest dolts in the universe?" Aside from being a little insulting, it's just not true. Many intelligent people believe these reports simply because, as the article points out elsewhere, because it is repeated the lie becomes truth.
People trust "media" to the extent they don't have expertise in some subject matter. What other result would you expect? There are too many topics, too many reports, and too many things demanding attention, general consumers and lay people, appropiately (though naively), rely on integrity of reporting bodies to filter that part of their world not their specialty(ies).
Reporting organizations (e.g., CERT) have an ethical responsibility to normalize and make canonical data issued for general consumption.
Unfortunately the technology world today is Microsoft's sandbox, and seemingly if anyone wants to play, be it media, competition, and lately even government, Microsoft seems to be able to control the rules. Sigh, again.
Every year, US-Cert produces huge fireworks in the security trade press with their annual summary of misinformation about security flaws. [...] The summary gives a total for flaws found in Windows and another total for flaws found in Unix and Linux. Last year, those totals were 812 for Windows and 2,312 for Unix/Linux.
Oh ****! Quick, someone tell me how to upgrade to this "Windows" thing!
Microsoft has established itself as a standard so much so that even a 'unbiased' consumer organization such as Consumer Reports basically only acknowledges MS when reviewing computers and making recommendations. Apple is a player but not top tier. It's no wonder AV companies pander to MS and spread FUD. Logically, one would think that a business that exists to correct flaws in another product would lead consumers to shy away form that product but no, because MS is a standard.
Not really...after all, these firms have absolutely no interest in eliminating the problem, but only in treating the symptoms. That's why they continually endorse an OS that is legendary for its security holes, while spreading FUD about more secure alternatives like *nix and MacOS, which have a chance of actually fixing the underlying problem.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Sure.
OK if I install this spyware in your computer and just backup your credit card numbers for you without your permission?
Thanks.
Oh, no, that's ok, you don't have to answer. We'll do it anyway.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Well, I certainly don't trust the malware industry :)
Seriously, however, I never buy any peice of security software without looking for testing results and reviews.
Also, I will never use any product that makes false positives intentionally (to scare the user into using/buying the product). That's just asking for trouble.
The whole thing is a protection racket. The more they can make you afraid of the consequenses and aware of the "threat" the more you are willing to pay for protection. The whole thing is based on a vulnerable infrastructre.
If there was a solid infrastructre that was trusted the whole industry would disappear. The industry is based on the Microsoft Operating system and its designed vulnerabilities. The industry would not exist without the flaws in the Microsoft Operating systems and workflow. If Microsoft fixed its stuff, or if people migrated to a solid infrastucture the industry would disappear. I am sure the industry as a whole is looking at Linux as a big threat, it could destroy their whole reason for existing.
As a whole the Linux client is not a market for this industry. They need to make Linux/OSS users feel the threat so we will by their product.
Agreed, the industry is full of FUD, along with other substances.
Noticed a copy of AntiVirus for Mac OSX @ CompUSA last week. $59! Three questions:
1) Who buys this stuff?
2) Why so much?
3) Why?
To my knowledge there is only one virus in the wild for OSX and it never really made an impact. I understand that AV for Mac scans for the billions of Windows viruses, but considering that the Mac is extraordinarily unlikely to become infected, it's similarly unlikely a Mac will pass on a virus. I know it's part of being a good net citizen, but ultimately scanning email is your own responsibility. I don't scan for Linux or mainframe viruses, or iPaq scripts. Why should I scan for Windows viruses?
Or am I missing something?
"Can the Malware Industry be Trusted?"
Of course it can't! It's the friggin' malware industry! Their business plan centers around installing stuff on your PC that you don't want on there and didn't ask for, and abusing your PC without your permission for their own purposes. Why on God's green earth would someone like that be trusted?
idiots, dolts, crap. There is a lot of name calling in there. He sounds like a teenager complaining about her friends. I don't claim to be the most articulate person around, but this guy shouldn't be writing articles. People judge you by the words you use. I got so distracted by his name calling I had to post before finishing the article, and I'm wondering if I'll be able to reach the end or take his side given the tone.
- The malware industry cannot be trusted to report when things are improving or a better alternative to their bread and butter os exists.
- Doctors poor at telling hypochondriac when there is nothing wrong with them.
- Car companies not reliable source of information about bicycles and public transit.
- Lawyers cannot be trusted to create legislation that doesn't criminalize everything.
- Politicians appear to be lying or misleading to get elected.
- Wolves unwilling to notify sheep in advance of attack.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Not all the readers would necessarily know that the two are the same, so it might be just to impress both names in their mind. That or make the 'conspiracy' larger than it seems./
No.
Yes, the anti-virus industry is as rotten as it appears, if not more so. In talking to non-expert computer users who use anti-virus, anti-virus causes more problems than it solves. Anti-viral software with automatic updating is essentially like installing a rootkit on your computer controlled by the anti-virus vendor. With just a little bit of training, and perhaps a different email client than Outlook, as well as using Firefox instead of (or patching) IE, viruses and malware are easily avoided.
Anyone who is serious about security doesn't run anti-virus because it does not fix the root issues of vulnerability.
Thy key is that anti-virus can be sold on fear and, since the average computer user doesn't understand that there is nothing mystical about viruses and their vectors are easily identified, fear sells a product that actually makes your computer less secure and less usable. That said, there are some good free programs out there, like ClamAV and Spybot Search & Destroy to help you as a system administrator check out suspicious files or clean up a mess on a specific case by case basis (the latter only applying to Windows).
Every year, US-Cert produces huge fireworks in the security trade press with their annual summary of misinformation about security flaws. The idiots in the press repeat the lie verbatim and the lie becomes real. What is the lie? That Unix/Linux is less secure than Windows. Granted, only the stupidest dolts in the universe -- and the trade press -- are going to buy that crap, but they put it out there anyway.
I got to that point in the article and remembered the red ink on a paper I wrote in grad school, wherein the professor said, "too pejorative to be taken as an objective analysis of the topic."
In all things academic or reporting, if you do not really have it, then at least fake objectivity....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Whether or not the malware industry can be trusted, anyone who calls a company a "servile buffoon" probably can't be trusted to be a impartial and logical journalist.
:) in both the anti-malware and journalism industries. I don't trust the Kaspersky Kooks at all, but McAffee and some of the other companies (e.g. PC Tools Software, F-Secure) do have some credibility in my book.
:P
Things are never as extreme as they seem - there are good & bad guys (and in-between guys, and girls too!
Then too, we know that the only way that all those evil writers can sell their stories is to make them sound melodramatic...
Spam vendors and open source vendors make lots of whacko claims.
[...] extremely low false positive rate, with less than one in one million messages being a false positive.
A few years ago, Bayesian classification seemed a promising way to filter spam.
[...] best recorded levels of accuracy have included 99.991% by one avid user (2 errors in 22,786) and 99.987% by the author (1 error in 7000), which is ten times more accurate than a human being!
That translates to better than 99.984% accuracy, which is over ten times more accurate than human accuracy
In the game of cat and mouse between spammers and anti-spam vendors, spammers and hackers quickly developed new techniques to "fool" the Bayesian filtering software.
File these under UFO sightings.
The anti-malware software industry is like the insurance industry. They want to provide their paying customers with benefit, but the last thing they ever want to do is encourage consumer behavior, law, or product changes that actually eliminate the problem, thus putting themselves out of business.
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
Perhaps the question needs wider phrasing: can the IT industry - not just the malware side - be trusted? Personally I don't think so because they seem addicted to denying the consequences of their own actions or foisting the cost on the public. You can see this everywhere from the paltry, tokenish efforts to tackle malware and spam by corporations that regularly turn in billions in profits, to the Heath-Robinson-like, energy-guzzling design of the PC itself, to dumping clean up and recycling via shady deals with the Chinese. Let's not even look at moral issues like DRM and Hollywood or Chinese censors.
OTOH, no industry can be trusted. If it wasn't for some tireless public-minded advocates the auto industry would probably have us still driving deathtraps with engines designed in the 1950s or the pharma industry, for example, would have us growing three heads while being charged 50 bucks for a paracetamol.
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Can the anti-malware industry be trusted? Can microsoft be trusted? Can the IT industry be trusted?
One thing that all of this overlooks, is that it doesn't take malice for hysteria to spread.
premise: people fear what they don't understand.
premise: most people don't understand computers.
I have a friend who fancied himself a home-taught computer expert. Armed with TweakXP, a few anti-virus tools, and a small handful of other gadgets, he was always offering to "optimize" and "fix" his friends' computers.
And lo! and behold, every single computer that was ever brought to him had "a major virus" or "a serious trojan" problem on it. Of course, there is so much media hype about viruses (and people's bad browsing habits) that this was fairly believable. However, the mere consistency of his diagnoses started making me suspicious....
Sure enough, after a few in-depth conversations, it turns out that he was using bad virus-detection software: some unknown little program that he assumed was "better than all the rest" because it "always found more" (it didn't occur to him that most of them were false positives); and moreover, it turns out he didn't even have a clear understanding of what a "virus" is.
But let me tell you: he had a stream of people in and out of his apartment that were absolutely convinced that ANY time there was EVER a problem with their machine, it MUST have been because of a virus.
#include
#include "OStest.h";
main(){
if((is_OSX() || is_Unixey()) && !has_slashdot_flames()){
}else if(is_MS_OS())
}}
Linux and OS X have a good record for resisting drive-by installs. But as TimC points out, the threat model has to include users downloading dancing cursors and weather forecasting applets with 20-page EULAs, readable three lines at a time, which bury a cryptic line or two which means "all your base are belong to us".
There are operating systems that can protect against that threat. They're not mainstream in design, and neither Linux nor OS X is among them.
>please consider that I'm Joe Sixpack
Joe Sixpack -- four digit Slashdot id -- the cognitive dissonance is too much, I can't survi