Anti-Virus Effectiveness Down from Last Year

juct sends us Heise Security's summary of an article detailing the abilities of 17 current anti-virus solutions. German computer magazine c't has found that, compared to last year, the virus scanners are having a more difficult time recognizing malware. Quoting Heise: "For real protection, however, in view of the flood of new malware, the way these programs cope with new and completely unfamiliar attacks is more important. And that's where almost all of the products performed significantly worse than just a year ago. The typical recognition rates of their heuristics fell from approximately 40-50 per cent in the last test - at the beginning of 2007 - to a pitiful 20-30 per cent."

Comments

My expectations are not that high...

[RuBLed]

I always assume an antivirus is only as good as its current signatures. Heuristics are good but nowadays, I could literally count with my fingers the number of times it did the job. The best defense is still knowing what you are running with or without an antivirus. Most of the annoyances I see are done by the local script / virus kiddies, their work rarely make it outside the country so the signatures against those are not a priority. (Although what I hate is that most of this local scripts/virii are just copycats of popular ones, yet popular AV's rarely detects them...)

Re:yeah, but..

[_merlin]

Considering how few viruses run on Linux, it's not as big a deal for Linux users. However, Linux machines that deliver content to Windows users (mail servers, usenet servers, bulletin boards, etc.) are a useful application for Linux virus scanners that detect viruses for other platforms. And the big names do function in this role: Kaspersky and AVG both have products for doing just this. And there's the free ClamAV as well, of course. The Linux versions of the big name products are probably no more or less effective than the Windows versions.

Re:where are all the Linux server exploits ..

[FireFury03]

If that were true, where are all the Linux server exploits being actively being used it the wild.

Linux server exploits _are_ being actively used in the wild. If you don't keep your server patched up then you stand a pretty good chance of being rootkitted. However, Linux distros tend to be pretty hot on security updates, meaning that a fully up to date system has very few known security holes. I suspect there are also more "idiot" server admins in charge of Windows servers than Linux servers (that is not to say that Windows admins are idiots, I just suspect there is a higher proportion of clued up admins in the Linux world).

However, the server world is very different from the desktop world - in the server world you can be relatively trustful that the admin won't go and install some random shiny new screensaver, etc. whereas on the desktop most people are not (and do not have access to) qualified admins.

A Linux desktop logged in as standard user is safe from the numpties and is still usable. The dangers of screensavers wouldn't even apply here; even if a user managed to run some malware script it would most probably be confined to the users home dir, the core system would remain immune.

There are a couple of important points here though:

1. Your average home user does _not_ have a dedicated sysadmin. When they want to install a package they (generally) need to become root to do it - that means that the numpties are equally capable of installing screensavers^Wmalware under Linux as they are under Windows. The thing the privilege separation gets you is that you can't _accidentally_ install something as root (e.g. via an exploit in your browser / mail client / whatever).

2. Even without root, a user still usually has plenty of permissions to do some evil things. They can't do some particularly bad things like SYN floods but they can still send out millions of emails and compromise other hosts.

3. Is the protection of the "core system" actually that important when you have a single user machine and so all the important data is owned by that user? The only thing this really gets you is the knowledge that your system binaries are probably safe (so you can trust that ps, netstat, etc are giving you accurate results rather than hiding the malware that is running).

There may be some merit in mounting all the filesystems the normal user can write to as "noexec" so that malware can't just install itself and run as the normal user. But this may place too much of a limit on usability and most distros certainly don't do this by default today.