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by kingforaday 488 days ago
What continues to amaze me is the continued lack of real-time detection "enterprise" products have on even n-day discoveries like this. Even five days passed disclosure, we still have very limited IOC signaling:

1. 212.bat.exe; 1/61; https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/2c76036ec0869f6b41bd8f7c...

2. haha.msi; 2/61; https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/1b2d956e3eded3e7220e3ff6...

3. MLANG.dll; 15/61; https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/a8e7f45d67b50948929adf35...

or if you focus on network/ips/perimeter detections:

4. web.winserve[.]ru; 1/94; https://www.virustotal.com/gui/domain/web.winserve.ru

5. scare[.]su; 3/94; https://www.virustotal.com/gui/domain/scare.su

1 comments

The problem with the traditional antivirus signature model is that it's reactive rather than proactive. Once it's been identified by human or automated submission for human and/or automated analysis, the damage has likely already been done if it ran on a clean machine(s) already. But that's only the fraction of malware that will ever be identified because a large but unknowable fraction goes by unidentified, perhaps for all time. (When I was a Windows SA 20 years ago, I saw all sort of customer machines infected by advanced persistent threats that used evasion without any sort of antivirus signatures because they were novel threats.) What may be scanned by N vendors and deemed "safe" today and/or 10 years from now could be in fact malware by behavior.

PSA: Never run untrusted code on important machines. This might mean forbidding the use of third-party extensions for common applications until they are audited, something Microsoft clearly isn't doing.