Antivirus Firms Out of Their League With Stuxnet, Flame 233
Hugh Pickens writes "Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer of software security company F-Secure, writes that when his company heard about Flame, they went digging through their archive for related samples of malware and were surprised to find that they already had samples of Flame, dating back to 2010 and 2011, that they were unaware they possessed. 'What this means is that all of us had missed detecting this malware for two years, or more. That's a spectacular failure for our company, and for the antivirus industry in general.' Why weren't Flame, Stuxnet, and Duqu detected earlier? The answer isn't encouraging for the future of cyberwar. All three were most likely developed by a Western intelligence agency as part of covert operations that weren't meant to be discovered and the fact that the malware evaded detection proves how well the attackers did their job. In the case of Stuxnet and DuQu, they used digitally signed components to make their malware appear to be trustworthy applications and instead of trying to protect their code with custom packers and obfuscation engines — which might have drawn suspicion to them — they hid in plain sight. In the case of Flame, the attackers used SQLite, SSH, SSL and LUA libraries that made the code look more like a business database system than a piece of malware. 'The truth is, consumer-grade antivirus products can't protect against targeted malware created by well-resourced nation-states with bulging budgets,' writes Hypponen, adding that it's highly likely there are other similar attacks already underway that we haven't detected yet because simply put, attacks like these work. 'Flame was a failure for the antivirus industry. We really should have been able to do better. But we didn't. We were out of our league, in our own game.'"
Wah... (Score:5, Funny)
Wha. We suck. But, what can you do?
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A better solution: (Score:5, Funny)
Release armies of flying cats.
Because if you're going to ignore what's in your database for two years, well, flying cats are better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-S4DZ_aWNuU# [youtube.com]!
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BMO
A: because it breaks the flow of a message (Score:5, Funny)
Re:P.S. (Score:4, Funny)
Not wanting to break NDAs but: You overestimate the intelligence in intelligence...
Re:Please, it's "Lua", not "LUA" (Score:5, Funny)
Ahh yes, Lua... thats tied to Angry Birds isn't it?
The best Anti Virus.... (Score:1, Funny)
I have seen it on here lately - cleanMyPC or something like that....pretty good so I have heard........
Re:Nothing new here (Score:2, Funny)
Conversely, military-grade body armor will stop rounds fired by 99% of the weapons held by civilians.
You should c'mon down and visit us here in Texas.