Slashdot Mirror
Antivirus Firms Out of Their League With Stuxnet, Flame
Hugh Pickens writes "Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer of software security company F-Secure, writes that when his company heard about Flame, they went digging through their archive for related samples of malware and were surprised to find that they already had samples of Flame, dating back to 2010 and 2011, that they were unaware they possessed. 'What this means is that all of us had missed detecting this malware for two years, or more. That's a spectacular failure for our company, and for the antivirus industry in general.' Why weren't Flame, Stuxnet, and Duqu detected earlier? The answer isn't encouraging for the future of cyberwar. All three were most likely developed by a Western intelligence agency as part of covert operations that weren't meant to be discovered and the fact that the malware evaded detection proves how well the attackers did their job. In the case of Stuxnet and DuQu, they used digitally signed components to make their malware appear to be trustworthy applications and instead of trying to protect their code with custom packers and obfuscation engines — which might have drawn suspicion to them — they hid in plain sight. In the case of Flame, the attackers used SQLite, SSH, SSL and LUA libraries that made the code look more like a business database system than a piece of malware. 'The truth is, consumer-grade antivirus products can't protect against targeted malware created by well-resourced nation-states with bulging budgets,' writes Hypponen, adding that it's highly likely there are other similar attacks already underway that we haven't detected yet because simply put, attacks like these work. 'Flame was a failure for the antivirus industry. We really should have been able to do better. But we didn't. We were out of our league, in our own game.'"
If these things really are being written by western intelligence agencies then don't think that Windows is the only platform they can compromise.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
You cannot solve the virus problem as it is an impossible situation.
The only thing you can do is NOT MAKE VULNERABILITIES. And actually FIX the ones you find.
The proprietary vendors are failing at that. Their fault is in the "not invented here" area as they cannot allow non-proprietary solutions to exist. And when they prevent shared solutions, they leave things overlooked, and then bugs, and then allow for virus entry.
Not everyone can know everything - especially isolationist companies. These do not hire people that worked with other companies very well, as they are afraid of "code contamination". Those that have significant cross licensing powers could hire... but they usually also have "anti-poaching" agreements as well. This results in the lack of cross training in various techniques of programming, and promote internal bad practice... and the development of bad policies on how to program.