Firewall Wizards mailing list archives
RE: Antivirus vendor conspiracy theories
From: "Ben Nagy" <ben () iagu net>
Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2004 10:57:47 +0100
-----Original Message-----
[MHawkins]
Antivirus vendors have painted themselves into their ownconspiracy theoriedcorner by purveying a product that is based on technologythat is purelyreactive and for the last ten years they've use one methodof protectionthereby enabling other attack vectors to be repeatedly successful.
And this is a bad thing WHY, exactly? AV does a very good job, in general, at looking at dodgy things as they enter and leave the filesystem. That was the original job of AV and remains the core of the products. A firewall, for example, does a generally good job of allowing or declining traffic at layer 3/4, but a generally crappy job at looking at layer 7. That doesn't mean that firewall vendors are hopeless and that they haven't evolved over the last ten fifteen years. The problem starts when "the market" start expecting FW+AV to protect them from all current threats - well they don't. You may as well get mad at your fire alarm when the pipes burst in your roof. At a host level malware is using a bunch of different attack vectors which were never in-spec for AV. Worms work by hijacking execution somehow, which is all happening in memory, before the AV gets a shot at it. They require no user interaction to spread, whereas AV have typically looked at Viruses (gasp) which _do_ require user interaction. Spyware, adware and all those tasty browser malwares work by exploiting the security identity of IE, making it impossible for an AV to tell that the functions are not what was intended. [MHawkins]
after year major infections spread and the consumer, faced with the cognitive dissonance between antivirus vendor marketingspin and the realityof a system rebuild, crashes, deleted files etc, wakes upand realizes thatthe antivirus vendors are peddling an awful product thatreally doesn'tprotect their system at all.
[Paul]
AV works against almost 100% of existing in-the-wild viruses, and probably greater than 90% of new viruses, that's not "doesn't protect their systems at all."
[...] Exactly. AV protects well against viruses. Do the vendors call it "anti all kinds of malware"? No. Do they claim that it bakes muffins? No. In fact, everyone is scrambling to get products ready for a market that is thinking exactly what you are saying, Mike - that the simple fact is that FW/AV doesn't protect well against current malware. To a large extent, that's because said malware is specifically designed to bypass those kinds of protection. [Paul]
The market won't accept better mechanisms, just like better firewalls are disdained in favor of IDS, which is also a reactive technology.
I don't think that's the case. What the market won't accept are _ideal_ mechanisms. Pretty much all the major players are betting they'll buy Yet Another Type Of Protection Software in droves. Personally, I think it should be called YATOPS, but vendors think H-IPS (Host Intrusion Prevention Systems) is more exciting - presumably by virtue of being tantalisingly vague. We went around this turnstile a few months back, with mjr ready to hold down the current state of OS / Software and hammer a stake through it's heart. YATOPS vendors think we can keep it limping along for another few years. [Paul]
As an industry, we've failed in getting vendors to go the "this is now allowed to work" have it blessed first mode, so we're left with picking up the pieces reactively.
Right. Maybe in ten years every PC will just be one big mobile code interpreter with proper sandboxing. Who knows. Cheers, ben (Disclaimer, I work for a YATOPS vendor, which may affect my point of view) _______________________________________________ firewall-wizards mailing list firewall-wizards () honor icsalabs com http://honor.icsalabs.com/mailman/listinfo/firewall-wizards
Current thread:
- Antivirus vendor conspiracy theories MHawkins (Nov 27)
- Re: Antivirus vendor conspiracy theories Mike Smith (Nov 27)
- Re: Antivirus vendor conspiracy theories Paul D. Robertson (Nov 27)
- RE: Antivirus vendor conspiracy theories Ben Nagy (Nov 28)