alt Hacker NewsChalk another one up for "Antiviruses causing more problems than solving them".
They 'worked' when they initially just scanned files for known malicious signatures. Now they're the equivalent of a sledgehammer to a wall with all of the extra bells & whistles strapped to them.
Application whitelisting is the remaining way forward if you actually care about runtime security. That & locking every access point down to the bare minimum.
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I'm a firm believer that hardware virtualization is the way forward for security. Qubes OS has the right idea, but running an entire OS for every application is demanding.
IMO it would make more sense to run every app in its own scaled down VM, like Microdroid for Android. Windows 10 had Microsoft Defender Application Guard for Microsoft Edge, and as far as security goes it was a fortress.
Too bad they discontinued it, and that performance was subpar. I would have loved to see them develop the idea more.
Antivirus is not a bad thing. Imagine running a company where there are 100 employees that click every link and open every attachment. Definitely safer with an antivirus.
No what they are is:
You want to keep a building secure, so you have some structure of access and key managment, who has access to what and who do you let in.
Then you let access and key managment slide, your front-desktop lets in some shady people and their is a hole in your back wall.
The solution: add scaffolding around the facade and empower some security service staff to enter every room through every window and chime in on every front desk decision.
I would say white listing will have to happen for everything in the near future: applications, ports, URLs (including fragments!), filesystem hierarchies, basically everything.
I'm not sure it's doable with current OS architectures, though.
White listing doesn’t protect against supply chain attacks. You need some sort of behavioral analysis.