Skip to main content

Anti-virus Statistics - Motivations

In a study completed and published by Avira (http://www.avira.com/en/company_news/recognition_performance_virus_protection.html) The results of the survey showed that for 34 percent (3,207 respondents) a long-established, trustworthy brand was key. Almost as many users, 33 percent (3,077 respondents), based their decision on the virus detection rates achieved in independent tests.

Detection rates - lets call this effectiveness of the control - as this is the key metric used to measure effectiveness. This is a skewed metric as for the large majority of evaluations (ICSALabs, VB100, etc) use the "in-the-wild" or ITW list of viruses to perform the evaluations. There is no evaluation of these product's ability to respond or even detect newly released virus and malware.

In all honesty really what we are dealing with here is preventative vulnerability management not virus detection and correction, and in my opinion there are four types of preventative protections required for the average consumer (some are currently reality - others not):

1. The consumers buying products based on their security. This does not exist in any meaningful way for the general community. Lets get someone to independently evaluate the software makers on this and publish it for consumers to make choices based on their performance.

2. A service used to update software code quickly. There should also be an independent evaluation of a code's susceptibility to vulnerabilities and speed in which these are patched by the vendor. This should apply to all software not just operating systems and browsers. Again there could be independent evaluations of the companies policies, practices and past performance related to this.

3. A perfect ITW detection engine - 100% - there is no reason a product should be less than this for KNOWN viral code. Really this should be combined with #4.

4. A product to detect and respond to new threats - ones without signatures - which is a significantly larger threat as they are generally being developed with more financial motivation. Apple's and Microsoft's authorization of unsigned code is a good first step but this should be done at the CPU level to detect suspicious behavior by software and apply a policy to it. Do consumers actually read a warning about unsigned code? or do they just click "continue". AMD - Intel - Other chip makers? Is this possible at a low level? and how do we trust these companies themselves.

Anyone else have thoughts on other ways of preventing the impacts of vulnerabilties?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Consumer Benefits of Credit Card Security

Recently, new types of credit card security features have be debuted, such as this one from Visa. And as some of the comments on Bruce Schneier's blog point out, its questionable how effective this is. I want to figure out what the motivation is behind these ideas, as it appears banks and the major credit card brands are not completely transparent about the benefits to the consumer. My example is this, one source has that in 2005 $2.8 million was lost due to credit card fraud from Visa and MasterCard in Canada alone. These costs are absorbed by the credit card companies as they protect their cardholders from liability, but as can be expected these costs are directly applied to the card brand customers, people and merchants, in the form of fees and interest rates. Now lets say that card brands can deploy a technology to eliminate 90% of this fraud and associated insurance and liability costs. Likely a large savings both in Canada and globally. Would we, the public and mercha

OpenSolaris, ZFS, iSCSI and OSX - Creative Storage - Part II

In part I of this post, I looked at the simple steps required to setup a relatively simple storage solution using OpenSolaris, ZFS, iSCSI and OSX. This was about a month ago, and I've made some significant changes on how this is used for me. At the end of the last post I left off on the part dealing with configuration of the iSCSI initiator side of the solution. I stopped here because there were some issues related to the installation and use of the software. The iSCSI initiator that I was using was Studio Network Solutions GlobalSAN initiator (version 3.3.0.43) which is used to allow for connections to their products. This software will also allow for connections to ANY iSCSI target! After the configuration of the iSCSI target on the ZFS pool, and installation of the client it was trivial to get the connection established with the storage pool, and it showed up in OSX as a raw disk which had not been formatted. I proceeded to format the disk as HFS+ and it then mounted as a lo

May Security Catch-up

Its been much too long since my last post - Sony's PSN network has been breached a few times , a record number of vulnerabilities have been published , and the US government has released a new set of cyber space strategies . On the cool tools and technologies there have been lots of notable releases: Some research from Albert Cotesi New Zealand on the traffic flowing from IOS to 3rd parties, now sniffable thanks to MITMProxy , and instructions on getting it working with IOS As always SQLmap is making life easier for the vulnerability assessor and pen-tester. Microsoft has released an updated to the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit - I'll be looking into this over the next few weeks, and how it can be applied practically. New major version of Backtrack also released, for those of you that are still relying upon live-cd's as a source for tools.