11–20 of 56 posts
You sir are a genius. Hoping for more posts of a similar nature and bookmarking now.
Wow, thanks! That means a lot to me. Honestly, I didn't expect this to interest anyone.
this is the second AV fiasco in recent months. is it safe to say that running an antivirus is actually increasing your risk instead of decreasing it?
During the last year, I discovered dozens of bugs in different widespread anti-virus products. Not all of them can be as easily explained as this one and only a few a as critical as this one, but still...
Concerning your question: In general, I consider it quite difficult (if not impossible) to give a concrete answer. The software, as it is now, is just in a horrible state. Depending on what your threat model is, how experienced you are as a user, it might very well decrease your system security.
I always hated anti virus packages both for the fact that AV vendors profit on something that shouldn't be required in the first place and because that software tends to hook into lots of places in the OS so if a backdoor is found you are immediately in big trouble.
this is the second AV fiasco in recent months. is it safe to say that running an antivirus is actually increasing your risk instead of decreasing it?
Where things get hairy are antivirus suites in particular. It's one thing to passively scan files, but AV suites have a bad habit of hooking into the operating system and making other changes, usually in the name of real-time monitoring. This is where I feel their supposed benefits fall flat. It would be one thing if these hooks were also passive, but Windows and most other operating systems make it difficult to access the kernel's data on purpose, and I don't trust an antivirus suite to do so in a safe manner. It's one thing for an exploit to compromise passive scanner running with userland permissions, and another thing entirely to exploit an AV suite with direct kernel access. The latter can cause the security features to backfire pretty hard.
Couldn't they have avoided it by writing a type-safe parser in Rust?
this is the second AV fiasco in recent months. is it safe to say that running an antivirus is actually increasing your risk instead of decreasing it?
Couldn't they have avoided it by writing a type-safe parser in Rust?
Don't make novelty accounts. It is against the rules...
I would love to hear some feedback, in the hope that the following posts will be more enjoyable than this first one.