MS Security Essentials reporting false positives in the Bitcoin blockchain
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MS Security Essentials reporting false positives in the Bitcoin blockchain
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Re: MS Security Essentials reporting false positives in the Bitcoin blockchain
#2So a joker decided to embed some Anti Virus bait in the blockchain, just a few bytes is enough to make the software go nuts deleting a whole lot of files the Bitcoin client needs. The solution the Bitcoin developers suggest is pure old-school malware style, XOR the blocks to hide it from the Anti Virus suites. Classic.
Re: MS Security Essentials reporting false positives in the Bitcoin blockchain
#3The simple solution is to not allow your anti-virus software to scan anything that cannot malware. There are exceptions to the rule of course such as MP3s that had executable code, but why does it need to scan every single file on your system?
Full disclosure: I used to work for an AV software company and personally think that AV is a dead technology.
Re: MS Security Essentials reporting false positives in the Bitcoin blockchain
#4[deleted]
Re: MS Security Essentials reporting false positives in the Bitcoin blockchain
#5[deleted]
The malicious code would have exploit software that handles the block chain. In addition, the size of the transaction affects your transaction fee, so you'd have to take that into account. Effectively, it's not good business if you're looking to do something like that unless you know you'll get a good payout.
Re: MS Security Essentials reporting false positives in the Bitcoin blockchain
#6MSE was top-notch when it was first released. It aced all the malware detection benchmarks, not to mention it was completely ad-free and extremely lightweight, which was unheard of in the free antivirus market. The high detection rate and low performance impact made lots of Windows users flock to MSE, myself included.
Nowadays, MSE is still lightweight, but it sits at the bottom of every malware detection benchmark. I've been recommending MSE to everyone around me, but recently they started getting all sorts of malware despite keeping MSE up to date. All of these were easily detected and removed by avast!, BitDefender, and Malwarebytes, but MSE just sat there like a cow, oblivious to the malware's presence.
Why has Microsoft let MSE rot like this? Now that MSE is built into Windows 8, are they afraid of getting slapped with antitrust fines if they shipped an antivirus that can actually compete with third-party offerings?
This year, I'm moving my family off of MSE. So long, it was good while it lasted. But third-party antiviruses have caught up in the meantime, and now they're just as lightweight as MSE.
Re: MS Security Essentials reporting false positives in the Bitcoin blockchain
#7I seem to remember just having some text copy+pasted into IRC channels used to send peoples anti virus software into meltdown.. but this was sometime like 2000-2001
Re: MS Security Essentials reporting false positives in the Bitcoin blockchain
#8So a joker decided to embed some Anti Virus bait in the blockchain, just a few bytes is enough to make the software go nuts deleting a whole lot of files the Bitcoin client needs. The solution the Bitcoin developers suggest is pure old-school malware style, XOR the blocks to hide it from the Anti Virus suites. Classic. https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/4069
From a comment on that issue:
>Just for fun, there's about 8000 reachable nodes on the network at the time of writing. Assuming that a large portion of the network is unreachable (NAT, filtering, intermittent, just not listening), it's probably safe to assume there's probably at least 50,000 nodes with the complete blockchain. If we XOR just the chainstate, we cause 50000 * 430 MB of disk writes, 50000 * 430 * 2 MB read and write combined, somewhere in the region of 43TB. If we XOR the entire blockchain on disk we cause 50000 * 21000 * 2 MB of IO, around 1.95PB of RW across the wider Bitcoin network. Incredible.
Re: MS Security Essentials reporting false positives in the Bitcoin blockchain
#9The simple solution is to not allow your anti-virus software to scan anything that cannot malware. There are exceptions to the rule of course such as MP3s that had executable code, but why does it need to scan every single file on your system? Full disclosure: I used to work for an AV software company and personally think that AV is a dead technology.
Could you elaborate on why you think it's a dead technology?
Re: MS Security Essentials reporting false positives in the Bitcoin blockchain
#10So a joker decided to embed some Anti Virus bait in the blockchain, just a few bytes is enough to make the software go nuts deleting a whole lot of files the Bitcoin client needs. The solution the Bitcoin developers suggest is pure old-school malware style, XOR the blocks to hide it from the Anti Virus suites. Classic. https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/4069
From a comment on that issue: >Just for fun, there's about 8000 reachable nodes on the network at the time of writing. Assuming that a large portion of the network is unreachable (NAT, filtering, intermittent, just not listening), it's probably safe to assume there's probably at least 50,000 nodes with the complete blockchain. If we XOR just the chainstate, we cause 50000 * 430 MB of disk writes, 50000 * 430 * 2 MB r…
Just 8000 bitcoin nodes? So much for the People's Distributed Currency.