Iria

At the Race To Zero contest at DEFCON 16 in Las Vegas last weekend, seven sample viruses and three sample exploits were reverse engineered to the point where they could bypass anti-virus software. The task took one team just over two hours.
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Source: BetaNews

BlueMak

A 19th century pistol is obsolete, but it can still kill you. Just because one way of detecting viruses is more predictable, it doesn't mean that there aren't any more viruses designed like that or released.

People who never use an anti virus are just looking for trouble.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

Judas

i never use an anti-virus.....

and i've yet to be infected from all accounts thus far.... unless i've purposely tried to..... which is always on a contained machine i don't care about...

the example above is a prime example of why i find anti-virus so utterly useless...

This is another case where i find UAC has a better chance of being triggered to let you know something is going down then an anti-virus picking up the virus.. as countless viruses are completely avoiding detection and modifying a number of critical windows files..... where in the case that someone leaves UAC on, has been picked up by windows as a modification and gives the user a allow/disallow option....

frankly....

my biggest beef now is not with anti-viruses or uac or computer related stuff hell i don't even care about the virus makers.... it's the people..... people are becoming more stupid every day.

If someone owns a car, drives a car, they bloody well should know how to properly check the most basic things, pay attention to the dumby lights and so forth.

Instead every day, people are blowing up engines, destroying thier vehicles in the same way that they are destroying thier computers by simply allow/ok/yes to all buttons that appear... .they aren't using both, they are litterly abusing both.

Email attachments are the number 1 infections for majority of people.. it's been stated for over 10 years.... don't freaking bother with email attachments.... don't send them, don't open them..... plain as hell, easy to avoid. Yet people insist on it.

Viruses getting so intelligent that they can mimic major ISP's tech support, companies memo's.... and even your family members/friends well enough to lure you into opening/running the damn thing.

I've YET to see a single Anti-virus program work..... all of them have been infected through the nose reguardless of the program in use, the circumstances....... they are all 100% falueable....


Even the Free Anit-virus programs have just as good a chance as suceeding in prevention as the expensive paid versions.

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Matth

Signature based antivirus is inherently in a permanent update battle with the black hats.

Caution IS your best antivirus, aided by tools that block holes that are exposed.

A NAT router is strong protection against any network probing attacks, or the old "connect an unpatched XP system and it will be attacked before you've finished downloading" problem.

That is just the first layer, and for standard browser/email usage, the router is a pretty much no hassle first line of defence that prevents exposure of LAN-side devices and resources to WAN-side attacks.

The next thing to turn the focus onto is "safe browsing", and IE7 is considerably less evil than earlier versions, in that the defaults do not allow unprompted ActiveX installation.

A key thing to remember (and I always bang on about it), is that signing is proof of source ONLY, not proof of safety.

Always get things from a trusted source, the latest spam scam seems to be malware downloads purporting to be Internet Explorer or Flash updates, and thanks to the dead slow uptake of email validations such as SPF or Domainkeys, any fool can forge an email as being from Microsoft, Adobe or whoever

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Mary had a little lamb,
Her father shot it dead
Now Mary takes her lamb to school,
Between two crusts of bread

BlueMak

Stupid question perhaps, but, how do you know that you have never been infected by a virus if you don't have an anti virus program? Simply because you are careful?

I don't know Judas, while I understand your logic, it sounds to me like not locking the doors of your house simply because you live in a good neighbourhood and you have very good hearing and if anyone enters you will hear him.

I don't think that anti virus products will save you from stupidity, but they can save the day when everything goes wrong at the same time.

__________________
The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

Judas

my doors are locked...

i also pay close attention to who knocks.. and usually ignore it all when they knock....

saying that without an anti-virus is like being without a locked door, or a door at all to my home is not exactly accurate at all.

provided that i've got a Router with a fairly damn good firewall, i'm fairly confident in saying that my door is one thick SOB.

I am careful, how do i know that i've never been infected? It's fairly easy paying close attention to activities that are what viruses due. Extra tasks showing up in the task manager is a fairly obvious one, but most viruses start disabling critical key control panels and such.

No i've never been infected because i don't deal with email, i'm strickly a hotmail user atm, because it's a 3rd party web based system, meaning nothing actually gets download to my systems besides a web page. And being that i never open email that are even from my own family members, reguardless of attachments or not, i'm pretty damn stricked on my own downloading of specific items.

And running Super AntiSpyware twice in the time that zardon has mentioned it, it's never reported anything short of cookies as threats....



Frankly people take anti-viruses as a false sense of security... you have no idea how many people think "hey!, i've got anti-virus software... lets go nutz" and are emediately infected. While the anti-virus is occasionally able to prevent loads of viruses, it only takes on download to be passive enough to not trigger the anti-virus to catch it, and only for it to disable the anti-virus from detecting any other active viruses it's able to download to the machine. Once the anti-virus is put into a position where it "thinks" everything is fine, the machine consistantly fills up with more viruses due to the initial ones getting in.

Trojans..... it only takes one.

No no, having a firewall, anti-virus ... anything software based is like having that security alarm in the house.... if your home and even if it's running, and you let the bad guys in.... your still screwed. And in the case of brute force attacks, all that can be done usually is for the alarms to sound, the stupid ones get caught, the smart ones hide. And the real intelligent ones don't even set off the alarms.

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BlueMak

I guess we will have to agree to disagree on this one.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

Vehicon

Just because you don't answer the door don't mean they cant use a window........

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Tril

some of my university computers are infected by virus that copy files to your usb key. They add a virus and an autorun file. The next time you connect your usb key to another computer that has autorun activated, it copies the virus to the computer.

Somehow, this virus is not detected by the antivirus used on the university computers. But it's detected by some others. I know Avira detects it.

You can get infected this way even if you think you're careful. You need an antivirus that detects usb key virus on your personal computer.