Real World AV tests

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Antiviruses are at worst vulnerabilities themselves which get targeted: http://www.syscan360.org/slides/2014_EN_BreakingAVSoftware_JoxeanKoret.pdf

Antivirus propaganda:

“We make your computer safer with no performance
penalty!”
“We protect against unknown zero day attacks!”.

Reality:

AV engines makes your computer more vulnerable
with a varying degree of performance penalty.

The AV engine is as vulnerable to zero day attacks
as the applications it tries to protect from.

And can even lower the operating system
exploiting mitigations, by the way...

[Vulcan]

Antiviruses are at worst vulnerabilities themselves which get targeted: http://www.syscan360.org/slides/2014_EN_BreakingAVSoftware_JoxeanKoret.pdf

I had a quick read of that, a lot of it is technically incorrect. They avoided the commercial heavyweights, focussed on some products barely anyones heard of (some AV engine out of Vietnam?). Also some of the exploits are heavily contrived (running Windows AV on Linux to attack memory?) so really world translation is doubtful.

You're still better to have AV.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

I had a quick read of that, a lot of it is technically incorrect. They avoided the commercial heavyweights, focussed on some products barely anyones heard of (some AV engine out of Vietnam?). Also some of the exploits are heavily contrived (running Windows AV on Linux to attack memory?) so really world translation is doubtful.

You're still better to have AV.

Whatever you say lol. His article is more convincing than you though. So you mean Bitdefender, Panda, Avast, Nod32 etc. are not widely used products? From Norton we already know that this threat he describes became a reality.

[guncrasher]

so mrripley what you are saying is that we are better off not having an av that having one?


semp

[MrRiplEy[H]]

so mrripley what you are saying is that we are better off not having an av that having one?


semp

Yes, ditch Windows for anything but games and you either won't need AV or the one you use will not get attacked against so much.

[guncrasher]

Yes, ditch Windows for anything but games and you either won't need AV or the one you use will not get attacked against so much.

yeah tried that.  had way too many problems with linux crashing.  it would work great at the beginning then after a few weeks something or other would stop working and spent way too many hours trying to figure out what the problem was.  I know a couple of things here and there but I could never figure out how to make it work right.  mostly it has to do with the hardware I use.


semp

[save]

Browsers apart, it's not that easy to protect a complete linux  installation as it looks.

Even with graphic firewall some typical server applications like ftp, samba etc needs tweaking.

[Vulcan]

Whatever you say lol. His article is more convincing than you though.

I work in network security. I see a lot of stuff, talk to a lot of people, vendors, developers. There are always people trying to get attention with presentations like his.

FWIW I have never had a virus on Windows since at least Win95,

[MrRiplEy[H]]

yeah tried that.  had way too many problems with linux crashing.  it would work great at the beginning then after a few weeks something or other would stop working and spent way too many hours trying to figure out what the problem was.  I know a couple of things here and there but I could never figure out how to make it work right.  mostly it has to do with the hardware I use.


semp

If you used linux Mint, that was your problem. It's never been stable. You should try Kubuntu or Subdivision instead.

[guncrasher]

If you used linux Mint, that was your problem. It's never been stable. You should try Kubuntu or Subdivision instead.

problem is you never know which one is your problem.


semp


btw once you recommended Linux mint.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

problem is you never know which one is your problem.


semp


btw once you recommended Linux mint.

If I did I probably thought at that time that they got over their stability problems. I was wrong.

It's a fact however that most of the linux distros are extremely stable and require nothing more than basic setup to serve as a web-browsing, music listening, image/video viewing etc. computer for most daily uses. The biggest problem with open source is that the developers are fanatic about licensing so you may need to install codecs etc. additions to get everything running. There are a lot of good instructions however how to do that.

For ubuntu for example, there are websites that teach you to make a basic setup '10 things to do after installing ubuntu'.

[guncrasher]

I tried ubuntu and did all the recommendations they did.   but just like the other 4 or 5 I tried, it slowly started to crash.  for example on the hd that I have  I am unable to update it.  the "control panel" or whatever you call it wont even come up, it just hangs in there.  I'll give it another try in a few months once some of them get a bit more updated.

linux is not a system like windows where it is "install and forget".  it's a bit more complicated and for people who like to tinker with stuff.  I like to mess around with stuff but in this one I got "way over my head"  trying to fix whichever problem came at me.



semp

[MrRiplEy[H]]

I tried ubuntu and did all the recommendations they did.   but just like the other 4 or 5 I tried, it slowly started to crash.  for example on the hd that I have  I am unable to update it.  the "control panel" or whatever you call it wont even come up, it just hangs in there.  I'll give it another try in a few months once some of them get a bit more updated.

linux is not a system like windows where it is "install and forget".  it's a bit more complicated and for people who like to tinker with stuff.  I like to mess around with stuff but in this one I got "way over my head"  trying to fix whichever problem came at me.



semp

No actually linux is exactly 'install and forget'. You must have done something wrong in the setup. For example my parents use a Kubuntu setup I installed to them 4 years ago. They haven't called me even once to fix it as opposed to windows needing fixing every few months.

Next time when you install linux make sure that your install DVD is burned at maximum 4x speed and that you follow instructions meant only for that specific distribution and version. If you try to follow instructions which are meant for other versions most likely you'll end up messing something up. Also the install media can be very tricky, if the cd/dvd has burn errors the setup may finish seemingly ok but stuff is broken in reality.

The last linux setup DVD I tried to burn with the built in burn tool in W7 using standard settings was faulty, IIRC you can't define burn speed in the built in tool.

[Bizman]

The last linux setup DVD I tried to burn with the built in burn tool in W7 using standard settings was faulty, IIRC you can't define burn speed in the built in tool.

Did you check "Verify disc after burning"?

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Did you check "Verify disc after burning"?

Not in that case, wouldn't make any difference though if/when the default speed produced errors.