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--- antimalware_software [2025/08/26 15:34] – created ultracomfy
+++ antimalware_software [2025/08/30 16:26] (current) – ultracomfy
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-Information Technology/Cybersecurity/ Antivirus
+<WRAP column right 18%>
+{{page>Templates:Secularization}}
+</WRAP>
+~~Title:Antimalware Software~~
+<WRAP centeralign>Information Technology/Cybersecurity/\\
+<fs xx-large>Antimalware</fs></WRAP>\\
-An antivirus is a type of software used in the detection of and defense against malicious programs and exploits. Electronic devices can store all kinds of data, most importantly login creditials, financial information and personal information such as pictures, chats, and sentitive files about or from their bank, work, family or other private matters. This makes those devices valuable targets for either destruction, theft or holding them hostage. In some cases, it's not about the value of the files on the device, and more about the device itself - some attacks exploit them for cryptomining, botnetting and other nefarious activities where it is more about the devices resources as an independent machine, rather than anything specific //on// that machine.
+An antimalware program is a type of software used in the detection of and defense against malicious programs and exploits.
-Most commonly, this is done through software, which is then called "[[Malware]]" (Malicious Software, or just "Virus" because of  how they spread). The defining feature of malware is that the actions it takes are unauthorized by the device owner, unwanted and generally destructive in one way or another, and it will typically not notify the user or give them a choice in the matter((Unlike stuff like kernel-level anticheat, which does notify you and which does give you a choice.)). Not all attacks are carried out with malware though, a lot of times this is a matter of exploiting bugs in (oftentimes outdated) software and gaining control over a machine that way. Keep your devices and software up-to-date. Other attacks are carried out by other machines on the network scanning for vulnerable devices or by a bad actor inserting themselves between the user and the internet.
+Electronic devices can store all kinds of data, most importantly login credentials, financial information and personal information such as pictures, chats, and sensitive files about or from their bank, work, family or other private matters. This makes those devices valuable targets for either destruction, theft or holding them hostage. Sometimes it's not about the value of files on the device, but more about the device itself - some attacks exploit them for cryptomining, botnetting and other nefarious activities where it is more about the devices resources as an independent machine, rather than anything specific //on// that machine.
-############################## How protection works
+Most commonly, this is done through software, which is then called "[[Malware]]" (Malicious Software). The defining feature of malware is that the actions it takes are unauthorized by the device owner, unwanted and generally destructive in one way or another, and it will typically not notify the user or give them a choice in the matter((Unlike stuff like kernel-level anticheat, which does notify you and which does give you a choice.)). Not all attacks are carried out with malware though, a lot of times this is a matter of exploiting bugs in (oftentimes outdated) software and gaining control over a machine that way. Keep your devices and software up-to-date. Other attacks are carried out by other machines on the network scanning for vulnerable devices or by a bad actor inserting themselves between the user and the internet.
-################### 0 Basics
+====== How protection works ======
+===== 0. Basics =====
 In general, the objective of an antivirus is to (1) prevent malicious code from ever executing on your system in the first place or, failing that, to (2) terminate a process if it is deemed to be malicious.
-################### 1 Signature Detection
+===== 1. Signature Detection =====
-Files are identifiable. With fancy mathematics, any computer file can be broken down into a numerical value that, in most cases, is enough to identify identical files((No, it's a heuristic. The content of a file gets simplified down into a numerical string in a way that is extremely //lossy//. That's a one-way operation and cannot be reversed. Would be cool, though.)). A //signature//. The cool thing about being able to identify identical files is that all you need now is a list of files you already know are malicious. Once you have that, you can just compare that list against any computer of your choice and you'll be able to weed out all the malicious programs you already know are malicious, quickly and efficiently.
+Files are identifiable. With fancy mathematics, any computer file can be broken down into a numerical value that, in most cases, is enough to identify identical files. A //signature//. The cool thing about being able to identify identical files is that all you need now is a list of files you already know are malicious. Once you have that, you can just compare that list against any computer of your choice and you'll be able to weed out all the malicious programs you already know are malicious, quickly and efficiently.
 From here on, your life is simple. If someone gets infected, they call you and say "hey, we got infected by something, we don't know what", you find the source of the infection, you determine the signature of the file, add it to your list and with the next hourly "Intelligence Update" everyone using your product will be immunized to that particular sample.
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 Critics will harp on and on about "Zero-Days", with which they mean "malware that isn't yet detected" as if that was the only thing out there. Yes, undetected malware is a thing, but for the home user that signature list is still extremely valuable. You are much, //much// more likely to run into malware already in someone's signatures, as opposed to something unknown. But even then, signature-based detection is not the only way to defend against malware.
-################### 2 Static Analysis
+===== 2. Static Analysis =====
 Back to the start. We are an antivirus product. We are trying to protect the user from malicious code. The user is attempting to open a program. We stopped that attempt for now, because before we let a program execute we want to make sure that it is safe. So, the first thing we did was to run the program against our signatures. That test comes back negative. Well, cool, this means that we haven't already confirmed this program to be malicious - but that does not mean that it is //not// malicious. We only know that we don't already know about its maliciousness. What do we do now?
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 The advantage to this approach is that it can get a pretty good insight into what a program may do without loading it into memory yet. This is critical because conventional malware can remain dormant on disk without causing harm; it is when it is loaded into memory (be it through the user executing it, or because of a scheduled task or through an autorun entry) that it starts doing malicious things. Analysing software without loading it into memory lets us look at the program without worrying too much.
-################### 3 Sandboxing
+===== 3. Sandboxing =====
 In cybersecurity terms, a sandbox refers to a protected virtual environment segmented off from the rest of the system, filled with all the sand imaginable but, ultimately, constrained to the sandbox. The box part here is the important part, as it means that nothing from inside that box can get out. Critically, this means a sandboxed program cannot access your data. This makes it perfect as a testing ground - throw a software sample in there and let it do its thing. Observe its behavior. Does it do anything scary?
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 The cool thing about sandboxing, though, is that it too is able to independently identify malware, even if sample wasn't previously known.
-################### 4 Behavioral Detection
+===== 4. Behavioral Detection =====
 Behavioral detection is what truly distinguishes good products from terrible ones. It is, however, also the hardest to get right, if you get it working at all. Of course we as humans don't care about cybersecurity in terms of software or code. As a company, you don't want internal documents to be exfiltrated to a hacker group - what you want is a system that can stop //that//, not just "programs that look like they're evil". The malware sample used to do nefarious things is just that - a sample used to do nefarious things. What you care about is stopping the nefarious thing. If you understand this, Behavioral Detection is just for you.
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 The cool thing about behavioral detection is that it works entirely independently and does not discriminate. Even the most trusted corporation on the planet might one day get hacked and publish a malicious update that will harm your computer/data - but behavioral detection does not care whether something is done by a program from a trusted source or by a program your internet friend told you to download((And then "disable your firewall before running".)). The location in which your browser's session cookies are stored is //sacred// and nobody should get to access it and then just casually make a sneaky transmission over the internet without someone raising a hand. That's potentially an infostealer. No program should be able to load hundreds of files into memory per minute, garble their contents and then save them back to disk. That's definitely ransomware. Windows does //not// like programs that it does not know. It is quite hard these days to run scripts and programs you, or someone you know, made. Sometimes it will just refuse outright. But behavioral detection can genuinely make a difference here.
-The advantage of this appriach is that, regardless of whatever program you throw at it - known or not, popular or not, new or not, published by a trusted source or not, system online or not, downloaded from a shady website or not, ran from an unknown USB drive or not - behavioral detection can spot them all (while non-malicious programs are fine).
+The advantage of this approach is that, regardless of whatever program you throw at it - known or not, popular or not, new or not, published by a trusted source or not, system online or not, downloaded from a shady website or not, ran from an unknown USB drive or not - behavioral detection can spot them all (while non-malicious programs are fine). Additionally, behavioral detection can spot all other kinds of exploits not delivered directly through an executable file. Even if a trusted program is weaponized, even if the source of the problem is a malicious image file or sound file, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log4Shell|even if the source of the problem is a programming oversight in the code of a programming library which lets remote hackers send arbitrary code to your machine, which it will then execute]] - behavioral detection sees that. Even supply chain attacks wherein bad actors gain access to a trusted program's development structure and insert malicious code into it, which will then be distributed quickly to a vast number of people, especially businesses, can be caught by behavioral detection.
 The downside is that behavioral detection is //hard//. To understand which system operations exactly are //malicious// is already difficult enough for humans to agree on. Then putting that from words on paper into actual code, all the while working around the limitations and kinks of the operating system's own security measures... yeah, it's a pain. But - the ambition is there and some of the results are quite impressive. It is, like all other things, just yet another layer of protection, and all layers of protection have cracks and weaknesses. Seriously, as much as I am praising behavioral detection here, I am praising the //concept// of behavioral detection - actual implementations vary in quality and are often held back by serious capability restrictions or just plain poor quality - current behavioral detection products on the market are //not// to be relied upon. In fact, no one single product should ever be solely relied upon.
-################### 5 What cybersecurity should not rely on
+====== How protection doesn't work ======
-Common sense.
+===== 1. Common Sense =====
+Common sense is the single most frequent advice that can be found on the internet. And it's true - human judgement can be a good and sometimes even the most effective layer of protection against threats of all kind. But.. who doesn't use common sense? I don't think most people would say that they are being irrational as they carry out an act that is irrational. Human judgement is prone to failure - that's why car accidents happen all the time. That's why most plane crashes happen. To say that you should primarily use common sense is to say that you should just drive better. Giving common sense as advice is to say "just don't make mistakes". Clearly, this is not how reality works.
+With heavy and potentially dangerous machines, operator training and safe handling standards are one half of the equation. The other half sits in the design department with skilled and knowledgeable people who recognize that even the most knowledgeable and experienced operator will make a mistake. Just a lapse of judgement. A brief moment of distraction, inattention. Tiredness, exhaustion or sometimes maybe just plain stupidity. Confirmation bias, pilots have to learn about this a lot. In fact, pilots will know best that the biggest threat to modern airplanes is the human sitting in the cockpit, and they are extensively trained to resist the kind of errors humans often make. To deny this reality is to deny decades of statistics and the science of risk management. Human factor is rule number #1. Don't fall victim to rule #1.
+As I said, proper education and training //are// a crucial part of protecting users from cybersecurity threats, but it is terrible advice to give, especially if expressed as "common sense" (which everyone thinks they have, unlike education and training) or if it is described as "enough" precaution (or anything close to it). It is not enough, it isn't even close to enough.
+Risk management, a proper science that would //never// even //think// about suggesting something as ridiculous as this, is about minimizing risks at every stage of the process - at the human level, sure, but also at the mechanical level. That's why 50% of the resources of product design go into researching how humans could possibly fuck up using the product, and then minimizing the ways in which it can happen in the first place or how to minimize the potential damage.
+And that still doesn’t cover risks beyond your control. Supply chain attacks, insecure devices on your network, careless family members, colleagues, or even vendors whose own security might be weak—all are threats you cannot fix with judgment alone. The digital landscape has countless entry points far beyond simply “not downloading shady files", and treating common sense as the primary defense ignores the true scale of the problem.
+===== 2. What not to rely on: Windows Defender? =====
+There is a pervasive myth that common sense plus Windows Defender are enough to keep you safe. Or that Windows Defender is as safe or safer than other products on the market. Obviously, "safe" isn't a binary. It's not that you are either "safe" or "not safe", the only truth here is that different combinations of precautions lead to different levels of //risk//. But still, the idea is that Common Sense plus Windows Defender is enough for the risk to be "low enough" for these people.
+Maybe. In fact, that’s the setup I personally rely on. But the problem is that common sense is empty advice and, for much of its history, Windows Defender was genuinely terrible. The people who say “Common Sense + Defender” today are the same people who once said “just common sense.” The only real shift is that now we’re debating Defender itself.
+For years, Defender was a failure. The most basic job of antivirus is keeping a signature list of known malware. Any serious product should ace this by default. Defender didn’t. It consistently missed well-known, widely publicized malware, including samples that were years old. Tests showed detection rates around 40%-60%, while products like Kaspersky or Bitdefender hit 98%. Despite that, people insisted Defender was “good enough", indicative of a complete lack of understanding of risk management or cybersecurity.
+Now, Defender has improved. It finally catches the obvious malware, its detection rates have climbed to around 95%, and it’s become a passable baseline product. Ironically, this means that people who were wrong for years are now accidentally right, but for the wrong reasons. Their logic hasn’t improved - the facts just shifted closer to their narrative.
+Even so, Defender still has major shortcomings. Its scanning is largely signature-based, with minimal static analysis and weak behavioral detection. There’s some anti-ransomware with protected folders, but reliability is questionable. Worse, it has glaring design flaws: A single shell command can disable it completely, delete its signature definition files, or set the whole PC as an exception. Registry tweaks and group policy edits can bypass it in seconds. These are not obscure attacks - they’re widely known in the cybersecurity community, and in some circles defeating Defender is treated like a sport. Microsoft is patching, but the holes remain.