Alex Scoble's IT Notes - An Information Technology Blog

To run scheduled scans or not

Is it still necessary to do weekly scheduled antimalware scans these days in addition to real-time scans?

It just seems like more and more that antimalware software is used to meet compliance obligations and not as a real security layer. I say this because as we see in breach after breach reported in the news that antimalware software effectively offers little in the way of real protection against modern malware threats these days.

Some people might say that you leave an enterprise appreciably open to infection by not running scheduled scans along with real-time scans, but is this true? By some reports, antimalware software can only detect about 60-70% of all known infectuous software, regardless of scan type.

So the question is, if something is only 60-70% effective today against malware, how is performing a scheduled scan going to help you? Once a box is infected despite real-time scanning protections, the malware is very likely to hide itself from the antimalware or disable the antimalware software altogether.

In my mind, it just seems like best practice is to use either real-time scanning or scheduled scans, but not both. Use real-time scanning on systems where performance isn't a critical issue and use scheduled scans on systems that require every bit of computing power.

What do you think?

How best to tell users that their systems are part of a botnet

This article is pretty interesting http://www.darkreading.com/insider-threat/167801100/security/attacks-breaches/240149075/how-best-to-break-the-news-to-users-that-they-re-a-bot.html Talks about the most effective methods ISPs used to notify customers that their computers were part of a botnet.

One takeaway is that both Windows AND Mac computers became part of the botnet, so that should dispel the myth that Macs do not get infected with malware.

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I'm a guest on Tech Webcast episode 226

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Check it out although don't expect me to sound all that great. Not exactly the best public speaker.

Forget about the bomb, the real danger is cyber warfare

One of the most dangerous things that our government is doing right now is the collection of unknown open computer vulnerabilities. Cyber weapons can be launched from anywhere in the world with very low cost, are difficult to determine who constructed or launched them and can do significant damage to our infrastructure.

When we opened the gates to their use as a weapon of war with STUXNET and Operation Olympic Games, we in effect sent all of our troops out to battle without leaving anyone to defend the homeland.

A much more effective strategy would have been to work with software developers to get those vulnerabilities closed and to make sure that our sensitive and critical computer systems were well defended against these types of attacks.

We denied Iran from getting the bomb for a while and instead gave them a brand new weapon that is far riskier to us because of the ease of which it can be used and the inability to attribute attacks to the real aggressors that launch them.