funsec mailing list archives

RE: Kaspersky strikes again


From: "Thomas Raef" <traef () ebasedsecurity com>
Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2007 06:33:10 -0600

Is it constant corporate rivalries that forced AV companies to "brag"
about releasing updates every hour?

Ya know, a few years back, the vendor that does the A/V part of our
front-end email boxes took about 6 hours to get us a pattern that
matched a fast-burning
email-based worm.   In those 6 hours, we got pounded by so many copies
all
sending themselves to everybody (which is pretty badly synergistic in a
mostly closed community like a .EDU with 50K active mailboxes, and
almost every single one of them has zillions of *other* valid addresses
on the same server just floating around on the drive waiting to be
scraped).  How badly?  The backend system folded under the load when
the load average got to 1487 or so, and it took us several *days* to
get a clean restart (it proved to be harder than it looked to bring up
the back end without the front ends dumping several tens of millions of
messages onto the server and pounding it back into the Stone Age).

When 6 or 8 hours of delay means you could have a meltdown with
literally millions of backlogged messages, suddenly "every hour" starts
sounding good...
[Tom Replied With:] 

Yes, but if that same sig had mis-identified a system executable, what damage could have been done?

I guess there is no clear answer - but it has been very interesting following this thread. Some very enlightening 
information has been shared.

Thomas J. Raef
e-Based Security, LLC
http://www.ebasedsecurity.com
traef () ebasedsecurity com
1-866-251-5803

No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition. 
Version: 7.5.516 / Virus Database: 269.17.6/1193 - Release Date: 12/22/2007 2:02 PM
 

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