Internet Anthropologist Think Tank: Anti-Virus firms engaged in Fraud

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    Thursday, August 19, 2010

    Anti-Virus firms engaged in Fraud

    Most antivirus software firms engaged in FRAUD.






    I've suspected this for some while, but thought
    it was from inadequacy, lack of ability, failure
    to master their craft.
    But besides that they have engaged in fraud.


    "On average, AV firms’ exploit prevention 
    software miss about a quarter 25% of all known vulnerabilities.
    Those are the findings of NSS Labs, an independent research firm that threw 123 exploits–the hacker tools used in drive-by-download Web attacks or infected attachments–against the corporate versions of ten top antivirus software products. Only 76% of those exploits were caught by the security software on average."


    “Given their market share and financial resources, you’d have expected them to perform better,” says Moy. “But that’s why you test. Size clearly doesn’t correlate to the best product.”


    Although NSS isn’t publicly releasing the full results of the report, it’s issuing cautions against four common antivirus products: AVG, ESET, Norman and Panda. Panda ranked lowest of the ten products, catching just 29% of exploits.


    Even top Rated Symantec doesn't do much better.
    But Symantec, the world’s most commonly used antivirus software, wasn’t far ahead of those substandard programs. Though NSS gave the company a “neutral” rating, it said the software only caught 88% of exploits in their original form. When NSS tested alternative versions of the exploit that targeted the same vulnerability in software, Symantec only spotted 53%, less than more than half of the other products tested.


    Moy says that the poor results of the NSS test are particularly surprising given that the exploits the lab tested were publicly available from government sources like CERT and MITRE. That means any of the companies could have performed tests themselves to find their own product flaws before deploying the software.


    But they didn't, they have the ability and the data and publish a poor product.
    The Anti-Virus cos are not protecting you against Known threats, that they
    have solutions for, isn't that fraud, at the very least errors by known ommissions.


    The newest threat the automated hackers are going around your fire wall
    and coming through your applications, that should take the AV companies
    9 mos to come up with inadequate protection.
    We have seen in the wild a system using MS files, explorer.exe run for around
    15 min. collecting data, posting into OneNote and print spooler and sending data out thru a Svchost.exe
    protocol, of course AV can't even see it.


    If the AV cos won't regulate themselves then we need Government standards,
    to establish minimum protections. We can't depend on the honesty of AV Cos.
    SOURCED FROM FORBES


    The minimum standard should 100% of KNOWN EXPLOITS, MINIMUM 
    I mean they are KNOWN.






    Gerald
    Internet Anthropologist
    Tactical Internet Systems analyst.


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    2 Comments:

    Anonymous Anonymous said...

    Is a doctor who cannot cure 100% of all illnesses committing fraud ? I find your argument incredibly weak. The sole fact that no virusscanner can block all malware variants is -not- an indicator of fraud. It's more a matter of high expectations.

    6:07 AM  
    Blogger gerald said...

    Read the article please, they are not blocking KNOWN exploits.
    A doctor who doesn't cure a curable illness is guilty of more than fraud.
    PLEASE READ article before posting.
    G

    11:24 AM  

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