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Thursday 2 March 2017

The elephant in the room

How do you know when you've got an elephant in your living room?
 - You can see a large grey animal taking up most of the space.

How do you know when you've got an elephant in your living room if you're blind?
- There's a terrible smell from the large volume of elephant dung.

The elephant in the malware room, is that AV products don't seem to be able to detect most of the malware that arrives in my in-box. But is there also a terrible smell? Yes, there is.

The terrible smell is ransomware. If antivirus software was effective, we wouldn't be seeing all those reports of ransomware attacks.

I'm sure that any decent AV will be able to detect all the viruses that are in the wild. I'm sure about this, because there aren't any viruses in the wild, or at least there's vanishingly rare. Because all the vectors by which viruses used to spread, no longer exist. When was the last time you saw a floppy disk?

Viruse are a problem of the 1990s. Today's problem, isn't viruses.

The problem today, is maybe 90% emails with nasty contents, so that when you click on the attachment, it access a remote site and downloads the malware of the day, which is often ransomware. The other 10% is malvertising.

And the sad thing is, I've already blogged about how all this can be prevented.

2 comments:

  1. Dr Solly,

    What I want to know is if the large grey animal takes up most of the living room, how is there any room left for the elephant dung?

    Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. There's always room for dung.

    ReplyDelete