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Thu, January 16, 2014

A Very Telling Antivirus Metric

By Rich

From Brian Krebs’ awesome reporting on the Target breach (emphasis added):

The source close to the Target investigation said that at the time this POS malware was installed in Target’s environment (sometime prior to Nov. 27, 2013), none of the 40-plus commercial antivirus tools used to scan malware at virustotal.com flagged the POS malware (or any related hacking tools that were used in the intrusion) as malicious. “They were customized to avoid detection and for use in specific environments,” the source said.

That source and one other involved in the investigation who also asked not to be named said the POS malware appears to be nearly identical to a piece of code sold on cybercrime forums called BlackPOS, a relatively crude but effective crimeware product. BlackPOS is a specialized piece of malware designed to be installed on POS devices and record all data from credit and debit cards swiped through the infected system.

I swear I’ve been briefed by a large percentage of those vendors on how their products stop 0-day attacks. Let me go find my notes…

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One Reply to “A Very Telling Antivirus Metric”

-ds January 21, 2014 at 7:40 pm

“We stop 0 day* attacks”

*in this sense 0 indicates the number of attacks we successfully stop.

Always gotta read the fine print.

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