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The Current State of the Malware/AntiVirus Arms Race
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Jul 03, 2007 10:47 AM
from the watch-out-for-weblife dept.
from the watch-out-for-weblife dept.
An anonymous reader writes "An article at Net Security explores how malware has developed self-defense techniques. This evolution is the result of the double-edged sword of the malware arms race. Anti-virus technology is ever more advanced, but as a result surviving viruses are increasingly sophisticated. What Net Security offers is a lengthy look at the current state of that arms race. 'There are many different kinds of malware self-defense techniques and these can be classified in a variety of ways. Some of these technologies are meant to bypass antivirus signature databases, while others are meant to hinder analysis of the malicious code. One malicious program may attempt to conceal itself in the system, while another will not waste valuable processor resources on this, choosing instead to search for and counter specific types of antivirus protection. These different tactics can be classified in different ways and put into various categories.'"
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When programers fight... (Score:5, Funny)
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Pick your poison indeed!
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Are you forgetting the Worm of '88 [wikipedia.org]? NEVER assume, for as we all know, when you do you make an ass of Uma Thurman.
Viruses will never go away (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Viruses will never go away (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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a) keeping the source code in plain sight,
b) having a plethora of distributions similar enough that skills transfer, but sufficiently different that many kinds of attackes are harder,
c) not treating the users and admins like a bunch of sheep, but instead requiring they learn a bit
are three reasons you hear far less about virus attacks in the non-proprietary world.
Someone will supply the counter-argument that lack of market penetration == lack of virus penetrati
Re:Viruses will never go away (Score:5, Funny)
That's pretty much a given here on
Parent
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ClamAV (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, by cheating
Funny little anecdote in the world of virus scanning (harmless although dishonnest).
CalmAV [clamav.net] is such an open-source virus engine (with ClamWin [clamwin.net] as a Windows port).
There have been several studies done about it (links on ClamAV's site) which reported that ClamAV, despite not being a non-commercial project, has among the fastest response time when new threats emerges.
The studies also surprisingly uncovered a small cheating : some companies did small update that didn't bump up the signature release number, but that included the new virus detection. Normally such non-upped releases should be reserved for modification of the sig library that don't affect the number of detected viruses (like repacking the data more efficiently or whatever). But the companies nonetheless tried to slip in newer sigs, hoping that users would not notice it. When doing a retrospective study, unsuspecting users will read that virus XYZ is detected since Sig-file release A.B.C and they will see that Sig-file release A.B.C was released on YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm, thus will come to the conclusion that the virus was detected earlier than the concurrene. (Source [informationweek.com], paragraph A dirty little secret).
But anecdote aside, ClamAV is a nice anti-virus engine, that has plugins (either bundled in or 3rd party) that enables on-the fly scanning of data at usual entry points (ClamAV is popular for mail filters in Unix. ClamWin has plugins for mail clients and FireFox's downloader [mozilla.org], etc.) and is a nice stuff to put in the "post-download script" of your usual peer-2-peer software. Please note that ClamWin still lacks a on-access scanning mode (although some 3rd party application like Winpooch [winpooch.free.fr] can start scanner before executing or reading files).
Parent
Oh please... (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically it's impossible to write the perfect AV software. It simply does not work. The perfect AV software could, of course, exist: Simply disallowing ANY kind of user interaction and installation of additional products. Perfect computer. Useless, but perfectly safe.
The problem is that malware does not use anything "special" that makes it easy to say "something that uses function X or accesses Y is malware". Doesn't work that way. What malware does it usually not much different from normal program activity. They access the windows registry, create keys there, they create and alter files (not necessarily system files, which would be "suspicious" behaviour to say the least), they plug into Internet Explorer, they open ports for incoming connections, they transfer data to and from the computer.
It's not anything that is by defintion "bad". How'd you want to create the "perfect" AV product?
Parent
Re: Oh Please... (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems to me that the malware authors are putting at least if not more effort into research, development, and quality assurance than the major OS and AV vendors expend on improving their products. I wonder if that is a function of the malware authors being compensated more directly as a result of their efficiency? They don't appear to be trying to bundle a "malware suite" or get additional revenue from licensing and support.
I wonder if AV vendors would be able to deliver a better product if they cut
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Thanks for the usual post about; "there aren't any conspiracies" -- now THAT is a pretty flimsy theory. People get together in groups to figure out how to profit from others, or do something that they don't want people to know about. Wow, that NEVER happens. What was I thinking?
I think the almost PERFECT AV software can be made. You basically TRUST the applications and processes already running on a system. Any NEW process that enters the system, but be acting in a defined way and only allowed access to
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What you suggest first of all requires a sensible distinction between system and user space. Which doesn't exist in Windows, at least until Vista. Be aware that you're dealing wi
A question about diminishing returns (Score:4, Interesting)
I assume it's getting more and more difficult to write viruses as time goes by - is that correct? If this is indeed an arms race, then one side or the other is going to run out of time and energy and money sooner or later, and I'm guessing it won't be the AV companies since there's so much at stake.
Parent
Re:A question about diminishing returns (Score:5, Informative)
Obfuscation is also easier than ever, with a lot of runtime packers and scramblers existing. It's easy to repack a file in batch mode that ensures that no two samples an AV company could get are the same. Thus the simple "signature" approach someone suggested earlier won't find a thing anymore.
It's also not getting trickier to hook into the system. Since there are still the majority of crates running with users having admin access, the same ol' tactics that worked 5 years ago still work. It's also not simple to track the use of "suspicious" calls, since Windows itself makes quite liberal use of functions that e.g. hook keyboard input or inject code into other processes.
Writing malware is also no longer the pastime of bored adolescent geeks. It's business. We're talking organized crime cartels here and that a "virtual" bank robbery (by hijacking online banking sessions) is more profitable and less risky than the real counterpart is a given. When I see the figures, I sometimes wonder why I stay on this side of the fence...
It still is an arms race, but with the AV companies in the defense. Constantly. An AV company can only react to a development, anticipation is pretty much impossible. There are far too many roads the next attack can come from that it's not feasible to develop in a certain direction without anything warranting it.
A few years ago, malware authors started to obfuscate their code. AV companies reacted by developing ways to crack that obfuscation. Then malware attacked certain AV software directly, as mentioned in TFA. The software was adapted to thwart such attempts. Malware started to contain rootkit functionality to hide itself. AV tools started to come with their own file system drivers to read the HD directly instead of relying on system calls.
You cannot anticipate that sensibly. What will be next? I don't know. I can only see trends and development in the malware that runs through my fingers. Which is a very tiny amount of the malware that gets written every day. It's a bit like trying to sieve a beach with a toy sieve. The big thing in malware today is (and has been for about a year or two) remote controlling, setting up servers somewhere and making the malware phone home. Yes, it's no longer IRC. It's a server in Belarus, Kazakhstan or Brazil (or some other country where the police has better things to do than being bothered by a server that doesn't really do any damage in their own country). So some malware packages started implementing tools that can monitor traffic and find "suspicious" traffic, just in case they can't find the corresponding malware. Possibly because the malware itself doesn't exist anymore, it was only an installer that manipulated some system file in such a way to send that info... and so on.
The current thing is (aside of what's been here for ages) id theft. Your amazon or your ebay account, your online banking information, your credit card information, and of course your machine, as a place to spew malware from, as a spambot or simply as a relay to route traffic through to obfuscate the real destination. With broadband becoming the norm and computers running 24/7 to download
There's much at stake. For both sides. I don't see a winner on either side too soon. Well, it's good for my job security, that's a given, but I didn't go into this venue just to make money (it's not THAT well paid). If I wanted that, I'd have learned ABAP.
Parent
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While you may have something there, I tend to believe that anyone who is constantly aiming at a moving target is going to come up a little short. What is an O.S. but a moving target?
IMHO the true golden goose is the consumer (or corporate buyer) who has been trained to believe that newer is synonymous with better... I believe this is the mindset that allows software vendors to pawn
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I had installed Avast, Spyware blaster, XP firewall (enough as my prior experience with kerio led to a reinstall).
I paused avast ondemand scanner to rip a DVD. XP prompted me and i just dismissed it.
Then after 1 hour i forgot to resume avast, and connected to net.
Somehow i got infected even though used opera.
Avast full scan picked it, but could not completely wipe it.
An update and a call later i was able to remove it.
It wa
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Re:Viruses will never go away (Score:5, Funny)
Geez, and I thought Gentoo was supposed to take a while.
Parent
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Or are you suggesting that every single one of the best AV software authors are, by some supernatural intervention, of such outstanding moral and ethical calibre that they would never do such a thing?
Or are you implying that every single one of the best AV software authors are so completely, single-mindedly, dry that they would never consider the academic exercise of writing extremely low-level "s
Evolution? (Score:3, Funny)
(There goes some karma.)
Re:Evolution? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
From TFA (Score:5, Informative)
OK, you had to go to the second page of TFA to see this, but at least they came right out and said that Windows is the primary and almost exclusive target of malware.
Unlike almost every other article about viruses and malware in recent years.
Mac OS X: Because it was easier to make UNIX user friendly than it was to fix Windows!
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Why is there very little "commercial" malware for Firefox? Firefox has quite a few security bugs and holes that can be exploited for phishing and identity theft, still, virtually all commercial malware relies on WinXP and IE. Why? Because of the numbers.
Writing malware for IE means that you can infect about 3/4 if not more of possible targets, while malware for FF means you will reach
Re:From TFA (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's say some nefarious guys are trying to get their malware installed on everyone's computers. So they buy some exploit code that targets IE. They say "Great, this will infect 3/4 of the computers out there!"
Now if these malware distributors are approached by some other guy who says "I can sell you exploit code that targets Firefox"... do you think the malware distributors will say "no thanks" or will they say "Great, that covers the other 1/4 of computers out there!" (Maybe they will pay less for that exploit, but they will surely use it if it's available.)
Since Firefox's market share is not insignificant (10% to 25%?), there should be a market for such exploits. Similarly, there should be a market (perhaps smaller, but still a market) for the 4% Mac users. It appears that despite this, the targeting of Mac and Firefox is very much less than Windows/IE (more than can be accounted for by market share alone).
I'm sure that part of it has to do with market share. However inherent security is also part of the equation. (And frankly I don't know why such a statement is so controversial on Slashdot... why should security be based on only one factor in the first place?)
Parent
Re:From TFA (Score:5, Informative)
Still, market share is a key factor when it comes to malware. Malware "kits" cost a wee bit of money, ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand USD, depending on sophistication and "additional services" (let's not get into too much detail, you get the idea). Basically, everyone develops for IE on a WinNT core machine. Why? Market.
Yes, there would be a market for FF exploits. But it's smaller. Development costs are pretty much equal for FF and IE exploits, and you can not really develop a "generic" exploit that targets both, unless you target the OS underneath and not the browser itself (that happens too, but generally requires a lot more knowledge about the OS itself, and it is by far less flexible). Since the cost of spreading malware is roughly equal for whatever you want to land, and doing so is not really cheap, attackers usually try to maximize their efficiency by limiting themselves to the most popular OS/browser combination (provided they want to do ID theft attacks). At the very least, they will limit themselves to the most popular OS.
The limiting factor here isn't that the "kit" itself would be costy. Yes, you might have a FF exploit kit available and you'd sell it for a fraction of the IE kit (but why should you, you could more easily develop an exploit kit for IE (there are effing templates for it in VC!) and cash in). But the spreading cost for either malware stays the same.
Thus the usual exploit targets IE/WinXP. Should the market share of FF rise, I'd wager to about 35-40%, we'll probably see mass spam of FF targeted malware, due to people using FF feeling secure and are thus maybe less wary. It might happen. But generally, you'll never see masses of malware for non-mainstream targets (OS, browser, webserver...). The cost of spreading is the same, no matter what your target is. So why shoot at something but the biggest target?
Parent
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Lack of Specifity on Infection Vectors (Score:3, Interesting)
Fruthermore, "trends" in malware construction obscure the reality that certain software packages (Windows, IIS) are otrders of magnitude more vulnerable than others (OS X, Linux, Apache). The unstated elephant in the room is that 95-99% of malware attacks are due to Microsoft vulnerabilities.
Crow T. Trollbot
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Microsoft's dominance over the market makes it more enticing to malware writers, regardless of how many vulnerabilities it has. If damage is their desire, they want the most damage; if it is a zombie network, they want the biggest zombie network.
If linux ever manages to overtake windows, it will become the primary target.
Mostly user stupidity (Score:2)
The lastest big thing are hijacked server pages that serve you malformed frames for infection, but even that still needs a bit of user interaction to become really "useful".
Essentially, what it comes down to is the user. There is of course the bimonthly exploit in some MS package, usually with surprisingly little impact in the
No mention of the effect of whitelisting? (Score:2, Insightful)
This story is all
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This is a great way of doing things for corporate systems. Lock the system down so tight that no software not approved can modify any system files (or even, make it so that no software can modify system files...).
For home systems it is slightly more complicated 'cause there isn't a central IT team.
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An awful lot of modern malware doesn't comprise "viruses" in the classical sense, it comprises trojans. The only way to absolutely prevent a trojan from running is by preventing the user from running arbitrary software. This may fly in a corporate environment, but never for home use.
Basically, it comes down to either being vulnerable to malware, or not
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For a corporate environment, yes prevent the user from running any software that isn't installed (which does prevent it being a "general-purpose device", but only to the extent that you can't run everything).
For the home user, set up the system so that the system files (and all the applications) are installed in a place where ordinary users can't change them. Then you force them (ordinary users) to run any other software that they want, in a sandbox.
Of course, you don't do away with ad
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It's violent territory... (Score:2, Interesting)
Malware Experience (Score:2)
I have no idea how they got there, but all I saw was a command prompt window pop up for a half a second and then I started getting IE popups (I used Firefox).
A virus scan/adaware/spybot would remove them, but they'd reappear on the next reboot.
A safemode scan of those would remove them, but they'd reappear on the next reboot.
As a result I formatted my Windows drive and reinstalled.
There's no telling how many root kits wer
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I guess/hope vista fixed this. But I actually found a USB virus that runs automatically thanks to one of XP's 'features' (even if you got autorun disabled...) Then it copies itself to certain location I won't ellaborate about since I don't want more deadly viruses spread, it causes itself to be executed with admin rights the next boot (awesome isn't it?)
Once you try to clean it, it becomes a biotch , if it detects the string ".exe" in any title bar, it will send the OS a reboot command, this kind of makes
I don't get it... (Score:2, Funny)
Sam
Viruses can't defend themselves against.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Answer (Score:2)
http://all.net/resume/bio.html [all.net]
http://all.net/journal/newsletter/index.html [all.net]
http://all.net/Analyst/index.html [all.net]
Ref.
http://all.net/ [all.net]
Paper:
An Undetectable Computer Virus
http://www.research.ibm.com/antivirus/SciPapers/VB 2000DC.htm [ibm.com]
Could this be the end of the Mac - PC flamewar?
Logic:
"... we can't stop here, this is bat country."
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
Hunter S. Thompson
God I hate articles w/o print links!!! (Score:2, Informative)
And the collateral damage of this' war'... (Score:5, Interesting)
We got hit here with a collateral listing of one of our tools as 'spyware'.. It shut down our software across the U.S.
We used a toolkit from a vendor to encrypt and compress files for transmission and for patch distribution. It was slick, lightweight, and sufficiently secure. it was also a commercial product, and was sold to another publisher who used it in their software.
One of their packages is an IM logging and monitoring tool. Good for AOL IM, and others. You have to either download it as shareware, or buy it outright, and then you have to install it, with the usual requirement that you actually have access to the PC. It's not and has never been distributed as 'spyware' in the sense of an unexpected or unsolicited install, nor was it ever distributed from a website or as part of another package - unless you repackaged it yourself. The biggest users were corporate IT departments monitoring IMs for compliance, and parents/spouses/etc snooping on others.
Not what I think of as 'spyware'. But someone else thought differently.
The IM logger got reported to either Trend Micro or McAfee as 'spyware' more than a year ago. Sporadic reports continued, until the latest (?) release came out and got popular. Then the flood of reports ensued. And when I say 'flood', I mean 'dozens'. I suspect some HijackThis logs started showing it, and after a few more reports, it was assumed by someone that this application was part of other kits. Listing the application by one anti- company leads to everyone else listing it. No one wants to be left behind, and none of the 'security' companies wants to be the one that lets bad stuff in, just because they actually evaluated the listing. No, it got listed by everyone.
And the controls along with it. Including the one we used for everyday, legitimate encryption and compression.
Our customers started reporting failed installs and reinstallations. One reported they got a virus alert. We looked things over. Why now? We hadn't changed anything substantial in years.
Then, on a whim, I Googled for it. BAM! Our control was listed as malware. WHA?
We figured it out an an hour. I asked around some of the contacts I knew at Symantec, etc. Their advice was simple - give up. Go get a new tool, recode, and move on. Surrender. Even though the module we used was by itself harmless, it was guilty by association. So we did. So far as I know, the company that produced these tools & modules is struggling with this. After all, their code signatures are now officially 'malware'. Kinda like banning drills 'cause someone drilled a hole in their finger by accident. Pretty soon, nothing gets drilled. Not a good state of affairs for the drillmakers.
And not a good state of affairs for drill users, either.
That IM logger that started all this? It was commercial software, and other than being highly annoying for kids who value hiding their IMS from snooping parents ("Hey, who's paying the Internet bill around here?"), or spouses caught on dating sites, the businesses forced by law to treat IMs as if they were business correspondence found this to be a good tool. Not so good any more. About the only way to use this is to keep writing exceptions to your anti- software. If you can. And keep re-writing these exceptions every damned update. Maybe more than twice a day.
It looks like this application is dead. Kinda sad.
We survived, though some of our customers did get concerned. In our business, being labelled as 'spyware' could cause massive problems, beyond the usual. It could be front-page of the fishwrap stuff.
In the midst of the virus/spyware/malware/anti- battle, this is one small story of how unintended consequences have real costs. We had to scurry to buy new stuff, re-code, and distribute. Our original tool vendor has had to give up on a good product, through no fault of their own. The application vendor that 'st
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It's essentially a beefed up task manager that allows you to suspend and kill specific threads and processes.
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Of course, there's nothing saying that a malware process can't either kill Process Explorer as soon as you run it, take steps to keep itself off the process list, masquerade as a necessary process, unsuspend its codependent process, etc.