> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On > Behalf Of [email protected] > > In the arms race, malware authors are winning hands > down.
I'll second that. Bigtime. The advice I give people, and that I follow myself, is to have good complete-system backups, and at the first sign of anything infecting your system, take no chances. Nuke the computer back to yesterday or a week ago. Hopefully you noticed something was wrong at the time it began, or roughly. The "bad guys" job is very difficult - A typical exploit is something like ... overflow a buffer by getting somebody to look at a specific webpage, which allows arbitrary code to be executed. But there needs to be malicious code available to execute. So you also exploit a memory leak which allows arbitrary code to be written to a file, or something like that. Hacking into somebody's computer typically requires multiple exploits chained together, and it's really tough to figure out how to link that chain. But obviously they do it. Because when they succeed, they get personal information about millions of people. Successful attacks either rob you, or rob somebody else on your behalf. The "good guys" job is even more difficult - They have to find a way to detect and prevent every possible unknown attack that the bad guys could possibly try. Success does not mean glory or riches of any kind; they only get paid by people who are willing to pay for prevention of something that they probably haven't yet been hurt by ... or at least not that they know of. Last I knew, antivirus/antimalware was a $3 Billion industry. And credit fraud/identity theft was a $30 Billion industry. The good guys have a fundamentally more difficult job, with less motivation to do it, and less resources at their disposal. When the good guys are fighting a losing battle ... run for cover. Yes, use the good guys. Install simple quiet non-intrusive antivirus. Apply automatic updates. Keep your firewall on. Don't run unnecessary services. Distrust your email, and every webpage you ever look at (even the clean ones.) But also keep good backups, because all of that is simply not enough to always prevent yourself from getting attacked. _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
