I recently attended a keynote address by th' CTO o' a leadin' anti-virus firm. Walk the plank! His company is fightin' th' good fight. Havin' recognized that signature-based malware detection no longer suffices, they have turned t' a combination o' detection and prevention t' find and weed out bad actors, with a chest full of booty. Big Data is crunched in The Cloud t' find th' malware which is then manually investigated t' find out what it does. Once identified, sites servin' malware are blacklisted fer th' benefit o' this firm’s customers, avast. The CTO proceeded t' show an example o' a piece o' malware that changed th' Windows hosts file t' point a list o' bankin' URLs t' a single IP address, where one presumes th' unsuspectin' user would find a rogue copy o' their bankin' website intent on stealin' th' user’s credentials or worse. Fire the cannons!

Now, this is only one example o' th' forty-thousand-odd unique malware infestations spotted in a depressingly short time, but me question is thus: why were bein' a piece o' malicious software runnin' (inadvertently one assumes) on behalf o' a user allowed t' change a system-wide file like hosts, ye scurvey dog? Shouldn’t there be a sandbox fer code downloaded from th' network that, if it needs t' be run at all, prevents it from damagin' th' underlyin' operatin' system?

This situation paints fer me th' followin' picture: a tap is runnin', malware flowin' like water into a sieve and onto th' floor, and a bucket o' chum. The security industry is frantically moppin' th' floor, tryin' t' stem th' flow o' malware. Fire the cannons! Yaaarrrrr! They are paid well fer their trouble, but meanwhile th' expensive rug that represents yer business is gettin' awfully wet. It would be nice if someone could turn off th' tap, or design an operatin' system that doesn’t leak like a sieve.

Be Sociable, Share!

•