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Little bit worried about Jetbrains products as well. I think they have development centers in Russia? Not worried about company, but rather some disgruntled employee, for example put this USB stick to your computer or otherwise we will prosecute you or your close one for participating in protests or some fabricated accusation.
Often sold under the marking terms "antivirus" or "personal firewall" or "cloud cyber security". Known side effects of this treatment are high CPU load, high RAM consumption, drain of battery power. Sometimes they also consume your money or looking at your data. So far I would consider other counter measures, like applying user rights, proper package management and re-consider your decision using this random stuff from the internet? If you're forced to use Windows the one with the least known side effects is Microsoft Security Essentials but even this has several drawbacks. If you're already using Linux or some kind of BSD you probably applied already these measures accordingly.
PS: This doesn't mean you shouldn't make sane use of software looking expectantly for malware. If your are a server admin and hosting a mail server which faces random stuff from the internet it makes sense to filter out bad stuff. And it won't spin up the fan of your laptop or drain its battery.
I warn about using any kind of snake oil. Often sold under the marking terms "antivirus" or "personal firewall" or "cloud cyber security". Known side effects of this treatment are high CPU load, high RAM consumption, drain of battery power. Sometimes they also consume your money or looking at your data. So far I would consider other counter measures, like applying user rights, proper package management and re-conside…
But permanently disabling it is very, very hard.
I will go on the record here and one-up them, warning against the use of any antivirus product. SO many vulns and gaping, smoking holes in that kind of software over the years, it's not even funny. Faux-security is what most vendors are peddling. https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1427935182200492039 is one of my favourite bugs from recent years. I acknowledge this bug is not specific to an antivirus product (but…
I have Windows Defender enabled on my machines since it comes with the OS (and work policy requires it), but I definitely had to exclude most of my work folders to be able to get work done.
It would be nice to have software that specifically blocks ransomware by trying to detect it heuristically, but that would probably not be very effective and the right solution is just to have backups.
It's curious to look on at this situation from Linux. Perhaps I shouldn't be too comfortable but it's really a different world. I suppose that one should take care which distribution one uses as that is also an effective entry point for software from the outside but at least a bit more obvious and open than some AV company.
I'm just glad that Microsoft eventually decided to bring antivirus in-house, and I don't ever again have to mess with 3rd-party security products for my Windows box
Little bit worried about Jetbrains products as well. I think they have development centers in Russia? Not worried about company, but rather some disgruntled employee, for example put this USB stick to your computer or otherwise we will prosecute you or your close one for participating in protests or some fabricated accusation.
Jetbrains was already banned at the department of defense and many other companies in the wake of previous hacks where they were suspected as the entry point.
We're doing worms and multi-stage malware. But inevitably the conversation turns to national boundaries, cyberwar, collateral damage (to individuals, hospitals, power plants, companies..). My students want to understand the relations between companies like Microsoft and the NSA, what happened to Siemens from the economic fallout, why the Iranians would be running Windows? Who paid to clean up the tens of millions of infected machines out there? I keep getting questions that begin "Bit surely....?"
We've been through an unprecedented period of human history in which the internet brought us together. That time is over.
The fact that a Russian company could trade freely in the world such that American companies, only within a decade of the Cold War, would use Kaspersky (which I believe is an a good product) is absolutely remarkable.
It's what Richard Buckland called "A miracle of interoperability" that allowed a movie made in Hollywood to be recorded on a DVD manufactured in China to run on a player assembled in India, according to standards designed in Nederlands and Japan, playing in a home in Australia.
That level of trust and cooperation has to run both ways. It's at least as remarkable as Russians, Chinese and Iranians running Microsoft Windows. The internet delivered on much of its promise to unite the world. But what I've seen in the past 5-10 years is so much effort by everyone to _undo_ that trust. Greed and surveillance capitalism has played as much a part as gobernment intelligence over-reach and economic warmongering. All parties have abused trust and now we are withdrawing into silos again.
From a business perspective, maybe we'll need to reckon with a future more centred around domestic sales and use. Perhaps the "splinternet" is just the beginning of a global divergence at the protocol level.
How can we (proponents of a true INTER-net) avoid this?
What about Telegram?
In either case, it is not a medium for secure communication anyway.
I use it more as a open forum software.