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Are A/V vendors really this clueless?

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© April 2015 Anthony Lawrence

According to "Botnet that enslaved 770,000 PCs worldwide comes crashing down", this "Simda" botnet was very stealthy, because it "morphed into a new, undetectable form every few hours, allowing it to stay one step ahead of many antivirus programs.".

Well, polymorphic viruses are nasty little beasts, so I suppose it's great that they did manage to finally control this. We can all breathe a little easier and sleep more soundly thanks to the truly brilliant efforts of A/V researchers.

But hold on a minute. According to that article:

The malware modified the HOSTS file Microsoft Windows machines use to map specific domain names to specific IP addresses. As a result, infected computers that attempted to visit addresses such as connect.facebook.net or google-analytics.com were surreptitiously diverted to servers under the control of the attackers. Often the booby-trapped HOSTS file remains even after the Simda backdoor has been removed.

What? You mean that A/V software never looks at hosts files and never bothers to check its entries against a presumably safe DNS server? For real? Such a basic and obvious check is not done?

Wow. That's disturbing.

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