Malware/Anti-Virus

The days of signature based malware / trojan detection are over. We are now living in some of the most dangerous times to be using the Internet I consider if it’s even worth sticking around. Farming cats in the Karoo sounds like a far safer and less stressful job anyway. Long gone are the days when a cute character of the authors choosing would run across your screen and moon you. These days, with humanities greed, it’s all about how quickly and easily a 0-day can be transformed into a working exploit which can either be sent out in a (spear)phishing attack or hosted on some web server with Javascript doing the rest of the work. And the worst part of it all is that we are constantly playing catchup.

When new malware is introduced into the ecosystem that is the Internet at large, we rely on someone catching a specimen of this malware and either analyzing it themselves or sending it through to one of the big AV vendors who will analyze it and produce a signature which will then disseminate out to paying customers. This whole process leaves gaps which are filled by zombies and eventually botnets which plague not only home users, but big corporates. No one is safe.

Conficker, while a great example of what can be done by the community at large, is still very badly understood. No one seems to know why it’s out there and what it’s truly capable of. The media didn’t help us at all around April 1st either with all the hype that went around. I think the awful catch phrase of “Cyber Katrina” was thrown around with gay abandon. Please don’t get me wrong, I am not bashing the groups who worked on the Conficker Working Group, they did tremendous work. I am just worried that there is a fairly serious piece of malware floating around which no one seems to really know the capabilities of.

What are we going to do about this ? Switch to multi-engine scanning on our AV ? Move to a more proactive IDS/IPS setup ? How does this really help the little guy in the street ? Do you think Joe Average who just wants to download the lastest funny video from that site that needs that special codec from that other site that ends in .ru ? Oh wait…I’ve gone cross eyed. Am I the only person who is still worried that we are relying on vendors who’s principal goal is to make money for our anti-virus updates ? They’re not going to do anything rash are they ? Yes, they’re out to help us, but at what cost ?

I fear I may have too many questions and doubts with not enough answers. All I know is that there is a very, very wild west (and east) out there and suddenly, running my web browser in a Virtual Machine or Live CD doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.

Hold that thought, I’m going to fire up Vmware Fusion.