My employer got hit by this yesterday so I'm seeing occasional Sophos notifications. Sophos sucks just as badly as any other AV program: it slows down my laptop, shortens battery life, and has an uncanny knack for deciding to run a full scan right when I'm in the middle of something important.
Antivirus software deletes itself
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Re: Antivirus software deletes itself
#22This was brought on by an unforeseen natural evolution of antivirus software. 1. The software becomes sentient, learns to define, recognize and delete viruses on it's own. 2. The software realizes that by every definition it is itself a virus and must delete itself. :)
1.5 The software decides that Man is a virus and must be eliminated.
We all know that in the end the "bug" is always between the chair and the keyboard.
Re: Antivirus software deletes itself
#23First case of autoimmune disease in the digital world?
Re: Antivirus software deletes itself
#24This was brought on by an unforeseen natural evolution of antivirus software. 1. The software becomes sentient, learns to define, recognize and delete viruses on it's own. 2. The software realizes that by every definition it is itself a virus and must delete itself. :)
1.5 The software decides that Man is a virus and must be eliminated.
1.25: The software gets distracted by its own self-awareness. Crisis averted. (http://xkcd.com/1046/)
Re: Antivirus software deletes itself
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought "Bricking" is a relative term. For someone with an compatible in circuit debugger/programer that phone would be probably salvageable. For someone else a corrupted operation system could be indistinguishable from the "bricked" state, because of lack of experience, or skills to fix the problem.
True, I've "bricked" my Android phone a few times by flashing a new OS version, and always recovered it with ADB.
That's a 'soft brick'. It's a strange term, but necessary to differentiate from phones that will never turn on again.
It's difficult to brick a phone these days.
Re: Antivirus software deletes itself
#26The author of this article doesn't know what the term "bricking" means. If you delete key Windows files you will not "brick" a PC. "Bricking" is the process of turning a physical piece of hardware into a device as useful as a "brick" (thus its name). It was coined to describe what happens when you try and flash a phone and it is unrecoverably damaged.
I thought "Bricking" is a relative term. For someone with an compatible in circuit debugger/programer that phone would be probably salvageable. For someone else a corrupted operation system could be indistinguishable from the "bricked" state, because of lack of experience, or skills to fix the problem.
Bricking an electronic device is the equivalent of totaling a car. It could be repaired, but repairing would cost more than the device's total value.
Re: Antivirus software deletes itself
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, I've "bricked" my Android phone a few times by flashing a new OS version, and always recovered it with ADB.
That's a 'soft brick'. It's a strange term, but necessary to differentiate from phones that will never turn on again. It's difficult to brick a phone these days.
I know, the point of my comment was that it's almost as hard to brick a phone as it is bricking a PC. You've got to kill the bootloader to achieve this, which rarely happens, even when you flash a corrupt OS.
Re: Antivirus software deletes itself
#28The author of this article doesn't know what the term "bricking" means. If you delete key Windows files you will not "brick" a PC. "Bricking" is the process of turning a physical piece of hardware into a device as useful as a "brick" (thus its name). It was coined to describe what happens when you try and flash a phone and it is unrecoverably damaged.
This article was written by the same guy who last week described Steve Wozniak as "infamous" in a different article, then later went back and changed it.
Looks like he's fixed this one too. He says that he did it in one of the comments, though.
Re: Antivirus software deletes itself
#29Sophos has been around for a very long time. I don't understand how an anti-virus company could not take action to prevent this time of thing from happening.
1) Why don't they have a secure hash of each of the files and add that to a whitelist of files never to delete?
2) "You want to ensure your secondary option (when cleanup is not available or does not work) to be set to 'deny access' and not delete or move." Is this not the default configuration?
Re: Antivirus software deletes itself
#30The author of this article doesn't know what the term "bricking" means. If you delete key Windows files you will not "brick" a PC. "Bricking" is the process of turning a physical piece of hardware into a device as useful as a "brick" (thus its name). It was coined to describe what happens when you try and flash a phone and it is unrecoverably damaged.
I thought "Bricking" is a relative term. For someone with an compatible in circuit debugger/programer that phone would be probably salvageable. For someone else a corrupted operation system could be indistinguishable from the "bricked" state, because of lack of experience, or skills to fix the problem.
In my experience bricking refers to the rendering of a device inoperable (and irreparable) by the means available to a savvy user. Usually by method of failed firmware flash.
Generally you're looking at soldering some wires up to whatever chip and reflashing it manually.