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German Government Agency warns about using Kaspersky

bsi.bund.de

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Re: German Government Agency warns about using Kaspersky

#41

Post by charcircuit »

kevingadd wrote: post #25
c0l0 wrote: post #17

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…

It's definitely reasonable at this point to just skip using AV. It won't protect users from bad security habits and it tends to make your system performance worse even if it doesn't have vulnerabilities. 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 s…

Malware writers make sure their malware is undetected by most antivirus software. Antivirus will not save you.

Re: German Government Agency warns about using Kaspersky

#43

Post by jeroenhd »

ho_schi wrote: post #22

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…

Anti virus can be very helpful in corporate environments if set up right and managed by knowledgeable people. Those people are expensive, but they're life savers when John from marketing clicks the "enable editing" button in a spreadsheet he just received from a spoofed email address.

The problem with corporate security is that security vendors often try to shovel as much crap onto your network as possible, rather than set you up with the security system you need. It's not hard to set up a company wide system that shows all green checkmarks and has tons of tray icons running to assure upper management that everyone's computer is now secure, especially with duplicate features and multiple daemons that a talkative sales rep might try to slip in for that sweet commission money. You also need someone competent to look through logs, keep checks on what's going on, and not get fired or demoted if they don't report anything new (because if you're lucky, there's nothing new to report).

For smaller businesses, the best you can do is hope for the best, really. Keep your consumer AV running and try to stick to common security advice, because there's no way you'll be able to get much use out of common business AV products if you don't have someone in your company who knows how to use those tools.

For consumers, Windows defender is often a decent balance. It's pretty good at detecting viruses, doesn't get in your face all the time, and although there's definitely a performance impact, it's low enough that office work shouldn't be affected by it too much. As a dev, I hate how much it gets in the way of many applications (especially those accessing many small files, like compilers), but I realise that this isn't exactly the most common workload for AV.

Re: German Government Agency warns about using Kaspersky

#45

Post by ganzuul »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #28

I'm reading this as I am giving a class on Stuxnet this morning. 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…

Decentralization from meshnets up. The user agent needs to handle the entire electronic presence, establish the identity of it's user, and keep watch on its friends like a herd.

Re: German Government Agency warns about using Kaspersky

#46

Post by vbezhenar »

hutzlibu wrote: post #24
ho_schi wrote: post #22

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…

"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." But permanently disabling it is very, very hard.

Intellij Idea recommends to exclude directories related to project and IDE from MSE. I think that's a reasonable compromise between performance and security.

Re: German Government Agency warns about using Kaspersky

#48

Post by tonyedgecombe »

hutzlibu wrote: post #30
protoman3000 wrote: post #23

What about Telegram?

The client is open source, so should be quite safe and the company is not based in russia. But I think some servers are? In either case, it is not a medium for secure communication anyway. I use it more as a open forum software.

>In either case, it is not a medium for secure communication anyway.

The problem is it is running on your machine.

Re: German Government Agency warns about using Kaspersky

#49

Post by throwaway4good »

Seeing that the west just killed off payments in the Moscow metro, stopped security patches for Cisco networking equipment etc. etc. There is a bit of projection going on: We fear that Russia might do to us, what we just did to them.

But what is the end result of this? Any "potential enemy of the west" will have to do their own tech, and we will only use our own stuff. Sounds like a bad trade for us; instead of selling all this stuff we have already made for a nice buck, we now insists that everyone makes their own.

Re: German Government Agency warns about using Kaspersky

#50

Post by qwertox »

c0l0 wrote: post #17

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…

Most insurances expect you to have an AV installed.
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