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Cylance Accused of Distributing Fake Malware Samples To Customers To Close Deals (arstechnica.com)
New submitter nyman19 writes: Ars Technica reports how security vendor Cylance has been distributing non-functioning malware samples to prospective customers in order to "close the sale[s] by providing files that other products wouldn't detect" According to the report: "A systems engineer at a large company was evaluating security software products when he discovered something suspicious. One of the vendors [Cylance] had provided a set of malware samples to test -- 48 files in an archive stored in the vendor's Box cloud storage account. The vendor providing those samples was Cylance, the information security company behind Protect, a 'next generation' endpoint protection system built on machine learning. In testing, Protect identified all 48 of the samples as malicious, while competing products flagged most but not all of them. Curious, the engineer took a closer look at the files in question -- and found that seven weren't malware at all."
Jail time for anyone involved, or we will keep seeing fauds like this in the IT safety community. I have no tolerance for unethical people in this business and neither should you!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Happened to us too in EU, but by the time we got to test the samples we were fed up with how bad Cylance was. When we saw that it detected all malicious files from their team but not ours and all other vendors didn't manage to detect their files as malicious we just burst in to laughter and closed all relations, i think any team with common sense will spot and differentiate bad solutions and frauds from good ones.
I had a really weird vibe from them when I attended a seminar. Then when they basically said they could detect all the malware they had on a disk... well I rolled my eyes, naturally they can detect all the malware they brought with them.
And when I tried to get the difference between what they were selling and the common heuristics that other AV vendors used... well I never got a satisfactory answer. Sounds like the same thing to me.
Of all the assets a security company possess, customer trust in the firm's integrity is the most valuable. They were once a close competitor for Sophos Security, and Palo Alto Networks, but now Cylance is only a sad historic attempt by tricksters to steal our money.
Why?
Because Cylance uses the VirusTotal API! So, of course it would get all these samples..using simple SHA1 hash checksums.
Their sales team seems to focus on low-skill (read: fix the copier, what's devops?) IT departments with smoke and mirrors tactics like this. I called it out right away, and went with a competing product. But based on that scammy behavior, this doesn't seem far off.
They are both thriving on your fear and money while pretending to protect something they are actually the worst enemies of.
Um... nobody trusts AV companies. It's all smoke and mirrors to sell to grandma and appease regulators.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Not surprised really, I tried Cylance for MacOS twice recently and found it quite ineffective against malware samples that were hashed by VirusTotal 3 months prior to when I tested it. Their support people just apologised and said they "took the issue very seriously". I tested it again when a major release came out and found little improvement (the undetected samples were hashed but still not detected by the ML-derived algorithm).