Live data from Hacker News

Cyber Scarecrow

cyberscarecrow.com

31–40 of 253 posts

Re: Cyber Scarecrow

#31
post #23

I would assume there would be a small intersection of people that would download and install a windows program from an unknown web page and those that are worried about malware. But perhaps I'm wrong

I know people /plural/ that will happily download cracked antivirus software from a torrent site.

Agree, you should get yourself backdoored by a trustworthy company like Sony. /s

Re: Cyber Scarecrow

#32
i'm confused about the tradeoff of not running the software that your pretending to be running? Most AV definitly feels like malware itself so maybe thats your point? But it would probably be better to run good software than fake bad software?

Re: Cyber Scarecrow

#34
post #29

Lol, this website is registered to someone in Iceland, despite the assurance that it is a "security researcher living in the UK". I'm sure the results from this experiment will make a cool blog post about pwning tech savvy folks.

That could be the hosting, the website is running on PaaS - https://vercel.com

Re: Cyber Scarecrow

#36
post #22

Sounds like a very interesting concept. I'd like to see someone actually test this though. Try running this on a Windows PC with Windows Defender off & just Scarecrow running. You could use the MaleX test kit [1] or a set of malware such as the Zoo collection [2] or something more current. I'd be very interested to see how many malware executables stop half way through their installation after seeing a few bogus regi…

Author of scarecrow here. Sweet idea, thankyou for sharing. What i would really like to do, is have some sort of stats in the app, that shows if it has 'scared' away any malware. But im not sure how to do that, and work out what other processes on the machine have exited because it saw some cyber scarecrow indicators in the systems process listing.

Re: Cyber Scarecrow

#37
As much as I'd love to see something like this everywhere, the problem is it's useless for everyone who loves to play online games or watch DRM-encumbered content, so the majority of the population... because DRM, anticheat and malware all fear the same set of tools/indicators.

Re: Cyber Scarecrow

#38

Narrator: and so the arms race continues. I guess if this gets enough attention, malware will just add more sophisticated checks and not just look at the exe name. But on that note, I wondered the same thing at my last workplace where we'd only run windows in virtual machines. Sometimes these were quite outdated regarding system and browser updates, and some non-tech staff used them to browse random websites. They we…

This works, I can confirm. Majority of malware threat running in a VM as a sign of researcher doing the malware analysis.

I am recommending doing this for over 10 years now.

Re: Cyber Scarecrow

#39
post #18
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Costs a lot of cycles to run those for real, and it’s not super common to get infected with anything, so you’re wasting cycles for a small chance at avoiding it. This could be better since, I assume, it doesn’t do a lot of stuff.

can you nice them?

To make them imitate the real activity? To imitate what scarecrow does?

Re: Cyber Scarecrow

#40
post #4

Fun concept. If the creators read this, I suggest some ways of building trust. There’s no “about us”, no GitHub link, etc. It’s a random webpage that wants my personal details, and sends me a “exe”. The overlap of people who understand what this tool does, and people who would run that “exe” is pretty small.

It is a cat and mouse game. And security by obscurity practice. Not saying it won't work, but if it is open sourced, how long before the malware will catch on? Here is one on github: https://github.com/NavyTitanium/Fake-Sandbox-Artifacts

Author of scarecrow here. Our thinking is that if malware starts to adapt and check if scarecrow is installed, we are doing something right. We can then look to update the app to make it more difficult to spot - but its then a cat and mouse game.
Post reply on HN