Cloud bubble may burst this year.........

[polonus]

Hi malware fighters,

The "Cloud" has been hyped during recent years by all sorts of individuals and firms, but the cloud-bubble will burst somewhere during 2010, according to VRT's Matthew Watchinski*, known from opensource IDS/IPS Snort. In 2009 the Cloud has been plagued by various problems likes Twitter that went offline, loss of T-Mobile SideKick data, the disastrous Amazon's EC2 uptime and Gmail outings. "These problems form a trend for all upcoming services to deal with", says Watchinski. The next round will be the abuse of the Cloud for malicious purposes, something we experienced already with EC2* and Twitter* being used as command & control channel for botnets.

Watchinski, head security at VRT, assumes we will see another major hack of a prominent Cloud service, where a gigantic amount of data is going round. Then he warns for "snake oil" on the cloud security- market. Everything will be Cloud-stamped during 2010. "The nice thing of the Cloud is that you won't experience how it works, the bad side of the Cloud that you won't find out how it works." Also the researcher expects more bugs and vulnerabilities, exploits, malware and attacks on and aimed at Mac-users,
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http://vrt-sourcefire.blogspot.com/2009/12/last-list-of-2009-predicting-security.html
http://blog.scansafe.com/journal/2009/12/17/amazon-cloud-has-rained-malware-before.html
http://asert.arbornetworks.com/2009/08/twitter-based-botnet-command-channel/

[DavidR]

Personally I have never been impressed with the 'cloud' as an antivirus tool, it is useless when off-line unless you have another AV, especially when some insist you get rid of your existing AV, only to replace it with their own desktop solution. Nothing more than marketing and much of what this whole 'cloud' AV is.

I am yet to be convinced of the cloud as an AV solution, now we are being told it could be possible to exploit it, great, even less impressed in this as a solution than I was

[ardvark]

Personally I have never been impressed with the 'cloud' as an antivirus tool, it is useless when off-line unless you have another AV, especially when some insist you get rid of your existing AV, only to replace it with their own desktop solution. Nothing more than marketing and much of what this whole 'cloud' AV is.

I am yet to be convinced of the cloud as an AV solution, now we are being told it could be possible to exploit it, great, even less impressed in this as a solution than I was

Hi David...

There are a few advantages to a cloud based solution such as the lack of "weight" on a given system but you are correct, the requirement the the system be (constantly) connected to the internet for protection is a huge drawback and one that will need to be overcome.

God bless

[polonus]

Hi my good friend "ardvark",

But I was rather impressed of the added security of the in the Cloud added av scanner ImmunetProtect,
provides added security next to ThreatFire and avast resident av-solution, scans all that is installed and also checks if program files are trusted. Bundles the anti-malware capabilities of all users within the cloud. Functioned once and on that occasion flagged rightly for a suspiciously encrypted USB av tool file -MXOne, did not give FPs untill now, so after I tested it from day one it came out, I found it good and reliable, well the feeling now is I do not like to miss it and restarted it immeadeately the one time I found it non-active, also occasionally scanned all my system files and active processes with it - next to scanning with Threat Expert memory scanner, so for me it was a positive "trouvant",

polonus

[ardvark]

And hello to you as well my friend Polonus

Yes, I like Immunet as well and feel it has potential. Extremely lightweight with seemingly good detection rates.

There have been two occasions where I've used it as a substitute for the traditional AV's because of resource issues. Here lately, even 512 MB's of memory has become to little for most of today's security applications.

Thank you for the picture of Moses, too.

May God bless you

[DavidR]

Personally I have never been impressed with the 'cloud' as an antivirus tool, it is useless when off-line unless you have another AV, especially when some insist you get rid of your existing AV, only to replace it with their own desktop solution. Nothing more than marketing and much of what this whole 'cloud' AV is.

I am yet to be convinced of the cloud as an AV solution, now we are being told it could be possible to exploit it, great, even less impressed in this as a solution than I was

There are a few advantages to a cloud based solution such as the lack of "weight" on a given system but you are correct, the requirement the the system be (constantly) connected to the internet for protection is a huge drawback and one that will need to be overcome.

Lack of weight is another myth in some cloud AV packages, for instance Panda's version weighs in at 70MB; light, my foot, it is almost twice the download size of avast.

I don't really care about light, I care about protection and when you are off-line your protection would only work if it has a comprehensive installed desktop element. It's all right saying but I'm always connected, not everyone is as fortunate as to have broadband. What happens if malware gets past your defences and kills your connection, we see this regularly in the forums a loss of connection after infection.

It might offer some good things, but until they overcome the issue when not connected, it really can't be touted as a solution as much of the hype alludes. To do that unfortunately you are going to need strong regular AV protection, which for me makes the cloud for me a dial-up a bit redundant.

[ardvark]

Lack of weight is another myth in some cloud AV packages, for instance Panda's version weighs in at 70MB; light, my foot, it is almost twice the download size of avast.

I was thinking of Immunet when I wrote the previous post although one could argue Panda Cloud is still lighter (as far as footprint) than some of the traditional AV's.

I don't really care about light, I care about protection and when you are off-line your protection would only work if it has a comprehensive installed desktop element. It's all right saying but I'm always connected, not everyone is as fortunate as to have broadband. What happens if malware gets past your defences and kills your connection, we see this regularly in the forums a loss of connection after infection.

Excellent point and one that is going to have to be addressed before the concept can really take off and stand side by side with traditional AV's.

It might offer some good things, but until they overcome the issue when not connected, it really can't be touted as a solution as much of the hype alludes. To do that unfortunately you are going to need strong regular AV protection, which for me makes the cloud for me a dial-up a bit redundant.

So far I've been impressed with Immunet Protect and for the time being, I think it serves well as a companion AV provided it does not interfere with the primary scanner.

God bless

[polonus]

Hi ardvark & DavidR,

I agree with you that in the Cloud av could only be an additional service that brings a couple of additional benefits next to your resident av solution which it can however never replace, it was never meant to though. From the outset on this initiative from an old Symantec staff member was meant to combine the detecting power of various users with various av-solutions - and a tool like Threatfire to give them an extra immediate defense layer. In that respect and in that respect only I am impressed with what ImmunetProtect does.
I think that some-one that does not actually have the right connection for it (like DavidR on dial-up) can't hardly comment from his own experience on this and similar services (DavidR, I think that the people that are local decision makers for your internet connection infrastructure are a bunch of Internet ignorants and old "f*rts" for that matter, you should write to your constituency for helping you "into the cloud" a.s.a.p.,

polonus

[DavidR]

The current UK Labour Government talks a good game but are pathetic at implementation. They are happy to introduce the so called Broadband Tax 50p a month for every telephone user to supposedly help pay for the infrastructure, with absolutely no mention of just how this money will be used or distributed; my money (excuse the pun) is it will disappear into the Governments coffers.

Not to mention when UK Government IT projects are initiated they are overdue, over budget and cr*p, not fit for what the grandiose scheme/idea that they proposed.

[cinchez]

In my opinion, cloud isnt as cloudy as it sounds...

Im more on a practical solution, like avast!

Cloud maybe is light but does it protect like a heavy one?

-AnimeLover^^

[Chris Thomas]

I think people are also ditching Netbooks

Sales are slowing compared with the initial expectations.

New laptops with ultra-low voltage processors are replacing netbooks.

[CharleyO]

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The difference is that netbooks are smaller than laptops and are much lighter when traveling. I took my netbook with me on a trip to the Czech Republic a few months ago and was glad for the lightness of it in my backpack.


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