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Anti-Botnet Market is Black Eye for AV Industry
alternative coup writes "eWEEK is running a story on the emergence of an anti-botnet market to fill a perceived need for software to deal with botnet-related malware (Trojans, keyloggers, rootkits, etc.). The article characterizes this as 'another black eye' for the existing anti-virus industry — asking consumers to pay twice for protection from things that anti-malware suites are missing. Venture capital money is flowing to these anti-bot products, an implicit statement that the AV giants are not doing their jobs. 'For companies such as Symantec, which sells the Sana-powered Norton AntiBot and anti-malware subscriptions, it's a nickel-and-dime situation. Symantec officials say Norton AntiBot is for a specialized, technical market segment looking for high-end tools to deal with botnets, but [Andrew Jaquith, an analyst with The Yankee Group] said it's a case of anti-malware companies double-dipping.'"
Symantec has already lost me as a customer. I began shifting my clients away from it as soon as the new spybot 1.5 released. It has a modicum of registry protection and it generally isnt a crapshoot as to whether or not its going to brick the computer its installed on...brick may be a strong term, but Norton/Symantec's footprint is way too much for a client machine...and now they want to add more.
Yeah...ditch these people now. AV on the client is a scam. Effective management and AV at the chokepoints can often provide enough protection I've found.
...has infuriated me for some time. This idea that some things are 'viruses' and others, 'spyware'. Last year, I tried to nail down Sophos on this very thing. If I'm protected against viruses, shouldn't I also, by default, be protected against spyware since that's how it usually gets on there in the first place?
'Oh no', they tell me. 'That's different...' Yeah. I see that. Now we got this going on.
People want their computers to be protected against any form of intrusion - from within or without - regardless of how it's classified. The reality is, that there are now forms of malware out there that are either undetectable or incurable once you have them. I use a gateway to help protect our computers, but every once in a while it still happens.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I wonder if some people use servants to check their snailmail for scams.
You just countered your argument. Our computers are meant to be servants and do stuff like this for us, that's the whole point.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
IANAAVE (I am not an anti-virus expert), but it seems to me that much of the bloat comes from the ever increasing virus signature database these engines have to keep in memory (especially for on-access real time scanning). Considering that there seems to be no end in site for these signature files and the high rate of virus mutation, virus signature tables seem to be an extremely antiquated and inefficient model for detection.
Of course, heuristics won't be a silver bullet as it brings its own set of problems (ie: false positives), but I think we'll see more of this used as time goes on. IANAB (I am not a biologist), but is seems that our body's immune system operates more on heuristics than some exhaustive chemical look up table. Considering the millions (billions?) of years nature has invested in our immune system I think we would do well to take a page from mother nature on this one.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
How can an OS add on fix a fundamental problem of the security of an operating system and the applications that are running on top of it?
It is my firm belief that AV software can never fix the real problem: broken OS security model and application bugs. For the AV software vendors this is always a game of catch up, the virus/trojan/worm/bot etc. creators have a huge advantage: numbers. They have more people figuring out ways to infect your computers, brake through your buggy and exposed application interfaces, send out executables with backdoors and viruses.... there are probably thousand times as many people working on the ways to take over PCs than there are people who are in 'business' of preventing this from happening.
And really, it is not that complex of a problem: run OS administration applications in one security level, run user applications in another security level, use hardware infrastructure to prevent these levels from intersecting and taking over each other, but of-course allow the highes level administration applications to take precedence over any user application and at least kill it. Do not allow execution of applications that are not authorized by the user. There are more good ideas than that, but basically do not allow a user application to hijack the system by pretending to be an OS administration application, do not allow user applications to change their access levels, do not allow them to hide their processes from observers. Designate protected data storage on disks, and allow that data only to be modified by certain applications that are assigned by the user.
However this is not a job for some ad on AV software.
You can't handle the truth.
Anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall -- all of these protections should be built in to the operating system.
We shouldn't have to add third-party tools to make an OS secure. It should be secure (or at least, secure-able) out of the box.
Charging more for a suite of software that all does the same thing sounds like a last-gasp attempt to deliver some profits before architectural changes force these companies out of business.
the trick to understanding it was to know that "AV" stands for "antivirus", not "adult video"
what does the adult video industry have to do with botnets? and nevermind the black eyes, that's a kind of adult video i'm not into
live and learn
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
... the best protection against botnets is never install Windows?
That will only hold true as long as the market share for the non-Windows operating systems remains at its current levels. Whether Mac or Linux is intrinsically more secure than Windows is a subject for another (lengthy and heated) discussion, but the fact remains that practically, an OS is only as secure as the user running it lets it be. Linux users are much more secure from threats than Windows users for two reasons. One: since Linux accounts for such an infinitesimally small percentage of market share, malware coders don't waste their time coding for Linux. Two: since most Linux users are enthusiasts who generally know what they are doing, they can harden their installs to a greater degree than your average Joe-Sixpack Windows user.
A large upsurge in Linux use, especially by the 'typical' user that clicks on anything and everything, and runs their console session as root, would be irresistible to the malware coders, and you'd see the same situation you're seeing with Windows now.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I don't use any antivirus at all. I just don't get infected in the first place.
Use Opera to browse porno. (Or just about anything at all).
Don't run crack.exe (it's a trojan).
Problem Solved. Am I alone here?
In the off chance that I get infected (Ok, I ran crack.exe), just take the hooks out of the system (hijack this, pv if neccessary, unlocker, done). Restart. Problem soved.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Except what you'll see is 50 million computer users running Linux as root all the time because an OEM configured it that way rather then be annoyed with support calls asking how to install some new program. Those 50 million people then get an email about free XXX videos, run an attachment that installs various kinds of malware, and we're right back where we started.
Clueless users given the ability to become administrators (which they can if they own the machine) will defeat any OS security.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Apple or Linux. My box is dual boot with networking in Windows disabled, as I pointed out in a comment modded "flamebait" this morning (who's going to flame me for giving my honest opinion about Microsoft, Ballmer?)
So as to not garner another "flamebait mod" from the astroturfers by pointing out how insecure Windows is out of the box, I won't. Rather, I'll point out that Linux and Mac aren't being targeted by the botnet operators. Regardless of the reasons, you're safe with Mac or Linux unless a cracker targets you personally (no OS is completely secure).
Poor Microsoft, if they ever marketed a secure OC Norton and McAffee would sue for anticompetetive monopoly practices and the EU wouldn't let them sell Windows in Europe any more.
-mcgrew
(I don't do Mondays very well and I'm on a losing streak lately so please be kind to an old nerd)
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Uh, because it pisses off their customers when they discover that, despite paying the yearly extortio--excuse me, subscription--fee, their computers still aren't protected?
Treat me honestly, fairly and openly, and I'm a customer for life. But if you sell me a "security suite" then nickel and dime me for all of the add-ons to provide the protection I thought I was getting in the first place, then I'll go elsewhere.
I used to use McAfee on my wife's Windows desktop (I use Linux, thank you very much) until I noticed two things happening: 1) the size of the product, and the resources it needed to run, kept growing, and 2) the protection it offered kept shrinking. Despite running the full malware protection on her computer, she *still* kept getting infected, and it was all I could do to keep her machine running. I've since switched to http://www.eset.com/Nod32 and have been, for the most part, pretty happy with it. It's fairly lightweight, works pretty well and has some cool features that reasonably competent system administrators will like (e-mail notifications, for example), although it doesn't tolerate unstable Internet connections during updates, unfortunately.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
It seems to me that, superficially at least, it makes sense to talk about a "botnet market" as separate from the anti-virus software market if you are talking about a higher-level network solution, not simply another program that consumers run on their PCs. But from the article, it's not clear what the focus of this supposed market is. If it's software that's run by companies with large PC networks, or ISPs, and if its purpose is to track botnet-like behavior by network clients with the aim of isolating suspect clients from that network, then it makes some sense to me. This could be a good thing...if it works. If it's yet another "safe computing" package marketed to Joe Sixpack, then it's an outstandingly stupid idea. If a computer is part of a botnet, the critical failure has already occurred, and no application package is going to fix it.
I suppose the people who are boosting this new "market" are responding to a money-making opportunity created by a real social problem: the fact that massive botnets exist, and that such phenomena rob us of collective resources--that is, resources that exist for our common use. Ultimately such collective thievery boils down to every individual having to pay more for services, and to endure degraded service quality to subsidize the thieves. Surely preventing this is a worthy goal...or a goal worth paying money for.
As many here know, the virus/botnet problem is due to two factors: a massively deployed operating system that is by design insecure, and a multitude of ignorant users. Of the two, the OS is most to blame. If Joe couldn't get his PC zombified by clicking some link to download stupid stuff off a web page, or reading some mystery email, the problem would be much diminished. However, I judge on the basis of their track record that Microsoft is unlikely to ever create a truly secure operating system; it's just not a priority. Because of Microsoft's ability to get computer retailers to bundle only their OS with every computer that is sold and because of most buyers' disinclination to learn about what they are purchasing, the situation is likely to continue—unless computer users are given a strong incentive to change their buying habits.
And here's where network-level anti-botnet software might change things. Suppose ISPs started to identify PCs that are compromised to the extent that they constitute a public nuisance or threat—and isolate them from the network. Obviously, the anti-bot software would have to be very good; you don't want a significant number of false positives. But it seems to me that if you do automated traffic analysis, it wouldn't be that hard to identify the zombies (here's where those who really know about this stuff get to jump in and tell me why I'm wrong). Once identified, the zombie is isolated, the owner gets a singing telegram notifying him of the action that was taken and why, and what he should do to fix the problem. ("Reinstall Windows" will probably not be the recommended solution.)
I think that this would help, but it would require several other changes. For one thing, it's not clear to me that ISPs actually care about botnets or viruses. I'm not sure why that is. (Again, someone with a better understanding of the communications infrastructure might want to help me out here.) For another, the [L|U][n|i]n[u|i]x OS has to become a commercial product. That's right: it has to be pried out of the hands of the well-meaning and hardworking people who have made it what it is today, and put into the hands of some money-grubbing capitalist who will make deals with computer retailers, guarantee support to end-users, and above all give it a decent name. You see, normal people don't trust free things; they only trust people who take their money. That's the fundamental stumbling block of the free software movement: in the market place, anything that's to be had for nothing is perceived as having no value.
Anyway, the result I'm hoping for is that, as a result of penalizing stupid user behavior, people will either start using one of the epigonoi of Unix, or that MS will crumble under market pressure and actually create a decent secure OS. Well, I can dream.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
why don't ISPs just set up honey pots and use them as test beds to determine what traffic is being generated by a bot, and kill the traffic as it leaves the costumer's computer
That doesn't solve the problem - it just moves it. Onto the vendors of networking hardware.
Core routers are "dumb as rocks" and can be relatively low reliability. The idea there is to treat each packet as a hot potato and move it on with as little "thought" about it as possible - so limited processing power can handle large numbers of packets. If the box goes down the others can find a way around it. But not thinking about each packet means these boxes are gullible.
Edge routers (the last router before the customer, or sometimes the one between two competing ISPs) are smarter and more robust: In the core there are multiple connections, but at the (customer) edge there is usually only one line to only one box, so it has to be as reliable as a phone switch. (If the ISP hasn't routed ALL traffic to/from the user through an extra box at the Network Op Center) it has to act as a "reverse firewall" to protect the gullible network routers from the users and keep the user from using resources he hasn't paid for. It's also the only box on the carrier side where all the customers' packets come together. So if the carrier is to provide comprehensive anti-malware service, that's where it ends up.
Edge routers have a lot of brains and a significant amount of memory. But for their main jobs they only have to look at headers and keep a small amount of state per customer. Add "deep packet inspection" for anti-malware on the current model and you explode the resources required. Now they have to look at the whole content of every packet and apply thousands of tests to it, exploding processor requirements. Worse they have to keep the state for every flow rather than just every customer - and a single tool-generated web page may be hundreds or thousands of separate flows, running in parallel due to browser optimization. And the state for each of the flows is enormous, including the state of the processing of each of the signatures being tested. Finally, they may actually have to hold the packets themselves, to reorder and/or defragment them for the analysis. So the storage requirements explode. And this resource requirement increases their susceptability to DOS attacks.
Further, smartening up the edge routers still further and giving them massive storage upgrades and inbound firewall duties makes them, not the users' machines, the primary target for malware vendors. They'd now have to spoof or subvert this machine to get their stuff to the users. But what a prize! Once it's subverted they get access to ALL the users and their traffic, regardless of the users' OS or anti-malware tools. (The zero-day window becomes "pwnership" of ALL the customers' data - no race between the infection spreading and the AV companies working out and deploying a signature.) Once in control, tapping should be a snap: The routers already have a government-mandated "lawful intercept" capability in place - just reconfigure it to send to the malware operation rather than the authorities. And talk about monocultures: The number of edge router vendors can be expressed with a single digit, likely with (at least at first) only one deep-packet-inspection product each. And they'll no doubt ally with the current anti-malware vendors to obtain their algorithms and signature updates.
So going to ISP-based filtering transfers the computational load of defense from a distributed web of end-users' machines to a small set of ISP boxes, increases the "software monoculture" vulnerability, provides an upstream target that the end user can't defend with a limited number of instances, makes it as vulnerable as the current worst-of-breed approach (microsoft OS and tools plus signature-based active immunity), gives access to ALL users on EVERY success, and raises the cost of the network boxes (and thus your networking bill).
Lowered security at a higher price doesn't seem like a good approach to me.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I thought fixing as a busted system was east. I press 'F12 for network services boot' and viola my machine has a clean install of windows pushed down!
Its amazing how a properly configured (and locked down) environment can be pretty effective.