Skip to main content

When Anti-Virus goes bad - or the continued need for testing

So by now you have likely heard of the April 20th anti-virus signatures released by McAfee which had negative effects on various systems (mostly it seems Windows XP SP3). More details here

Judging from the responses from administrators, etc. this seemed to have caused a number of outages of various levels (including at least one 911 call center documented in an article on isc.sans.org).

This is not the first time that automatic updates of software (either patches, anti-virus updates, etc.) have caused unexpected results on systems. This should be a reminder to all who are responsible for the maintenance of systems or software that you still can not trust that software from a vendor will always work on all of the environments that you are responsible for.

In previous engagements I've had to respond to outages caused by patches or updates, and after going though this a couple times it was decided that the solution was to centralize the deployment of patches/Anti-virus updates and to have at least a high level testing process to verify that the update works (is deployed correctly), and that there are no obvious stability issues at the OS level due to the patch/update.

This centralized deployment and testing has saved me a number of headaches and I strongly encourage this approach, especially if the environment you are responsible for is one that has a low tolerance for outages. Another benefit of centralizing the anti-virus deployments is that you can more accurately be aware of systems that are not being updated (i.e. you know how many systems will be vulnerable in the event you have to push out an emergency Anti-virus update).

->Pierre

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Requirements for Information Security

If you want to get into Information Security you HAVE to be a/have this skill... Why this is total BS. Almost daily I see someone posting on twitter, trying to be helpful to folks who are looking to get into InfoSec. Often I see "If you want to be in Information Security (Cyber Security) then you HAVE to be a programmer" or "If you want to be successful you have to be a hacker/have a criminal record/have abused systems without permission" etc. While having technical capabilities (such as programming) and having the ability to compromise a system shows a specific skillset neither are required. When talking to people who are interested in Information Security I often refer to it as a cake, there are tons of slices, many flavors, many pieces and parts you can sample, choose to focus on, will be expected to know something about, etc. Incident Response and Forensics (my current focus) is not the only part of Information Security, and certainly not the only part tha
Post a Comment
Read more

Busting the myth of the malicious insider

The Myth of the Insider Threat Too often after the announcement of a new breach, the first reaction from the victim company and the media is "another malicious insider attack".  Case in point, I was catching up on news from various sources and came across the following: http://www.idgconnect.com/abstract/19647/lessons-sage-leak " “We believe there has been some unauthorised access using an internal login to the data of a small number of our UK customers so we are working closely with the authorities to investigate the situation,” the Newcastle, England-headquartered firm said in a statement." Of course an internal login was used to access the data, as part of the attack lifecycle, during your reconnaissance phase you identify accounts to target for possible compromise, based on the access/role of the individual.   Phishing attacks or other simply attacks are often successful in gathering login credentials for individual users, which can then of
Post a Comment
Read more
Weekly recap and why you should be concerned about "attackers" even if you have "nothing to hide" Why you should be aware of, defend against, and prevent attackers... even at home: I often hear from future victims "well I don't have anything to hide/anything of value/why would they target me!?" It's really not about you, usually the attackers aren't looking for your data (if they get it, or have easy access to it, they may try to profit from it, but the people doing the compromising aren't usually the same folks that monetize). What the attackers want are compromised systems they can use to do what they want at scale. So if they can compromise 50 systems, they can send 50X the amount of SPAM... 100 systems, 100X, etc. Some operations get paid based on the number of emails they can send per day. Of course the email will likely not just be SPAM, but may also be malicious (ransomware, etc.). http://thehackernews.com/2017/09/linux-ma
Post a Comment
Read more