Displaying items by tag: AntiVirus

If you have been paying attention to the technical news lately you might have noticed more than a few articles pointing fingers back and forth between the AntiMalware company Cylance and the… well the industry. The argument (if you have not already read about it) goes something like this; the big AV/AM companies are accusing Cylance of stacking the deck in their favor when they demo their product against the competition. Cylance, for their part, claims that they provide a realistic test in comparison to what is usually done when it comes to AV/AM testing. Both sides have their points and it calls into question something that exists in all levels of the technical press and testing bodies; real world vs scripted testing.

At times it seems that the words Microsoft and Malware go hand-in-hand. I do not think that a day goes by that we do not hear about a new malware threat (often simply an old threat that has been modified). This has put Microsoft in an interesting position. They are always working to shore up holes in their operating systems we can see this by the continuous patches and hotfixes that are in existence for Windows (all versions). Of course it is not an easy task to develop an OS that is safe(er) or secure(ish) and still make it easy to operate. However recently we have seen Microsoft go to some extremes in trying to keep up with things… sometimes they appear to go way too far.

There is a lot of talk in the news about a very old piece of malware. This malicious code was called DNSChanger and was part of a criminal enterprise that intended to route people’s traffic through their own servers instead of the intended servers. This opened the victims up to countless other potential infections. The Malware was discovered back in 2004 and had a small amount of fame for its time. The impact of this particular infection was rated into the millions of Windows based PCs. Although the malware was identified and six people were arrested for it, the authorities did not know what to do about the infected systems (which is VERY odd).