Felipe Alfaro Solana

While reading a post on how current anti-virus solutions are starting to become complete inefficient and even reporting false positives, a few thoughts came to my mind.

The first one is that I’ve been running with no anti-virus on my computers for more than 8 years now. The use of low-risk platforms, like UNIX-based systems, and systems with a low market share like Mac OS X, combined with common sense, education and caution has kept me safe from viruses, trojans and other malware for this long.

The second thought is that current anti-virus software is outdated, and does not meet expectations, nor does it meet currently system designs. I think anti-virus analysis should be done in a distributed fashion. For corporations, samples can be distributed and analyzed across workstations and those that are suspect of being evil can be sent to the anti-virus manufacturer for further analysis. For end-users and consumers, samples can be distributed and analyzed by clusters of machines, provided typically by the anti-virus manufacturer, that are properly secured and trusted, all in a peer-to-peer fashion.

The third idea is that no matter how analysis is done, the long-term solution consists of fixing current applications, operating systems and hardware architectures to make exploits and malware more and more difficult, and also to educate end-users. In my opinion, education is the most efficient way of preventing this attacks because it’s cheap and usually has impact on the short- and long-term. Common sense and education can deter most attacks and security problems.

What are your thoughts on this?

It is probably not very well-known for many, and probably ignored by most, but it seems that Mac OS X and specifically Safari leaves much to be desired when talking about security.

During the Pwn2Own contest, Safari was the first browser to fall, in the order of seconds, when put under attack by Charlie Miller. This has been reported in several places, like Pwn2Own 2009: Safari/MacBook falls in seconds, or Miller: Safari on Mac First to Fall During PWN2OWN Contest, or Miller Cracks Safari Within Seconds, Wins PWN2OWN Contest. For the second year in a row, Safari/MacBook has been the browser to fall under attack the first.

So, if you are a user of Mac OS X, be very careful when using Safari. These attacks so far require you to click on links specifically crafted to cause harm to your computer, which might allow the attacker to gain total control of your machine. Hence, the importance of never running with an account that has administrative privileges.

I’ve been thinking for a while how to properly keep back-ups of all of my data while, at the same time, saving a few bucks. Since the “cloud computing” term is now floating all over the Internet, I thought that a distributed, remote back-up service might do the work for me.

I looked around and found quite different services, but most of them offer ridiculously small storage size, like 5GB, or force me into using sub-par Web-based user interfaces that make using rsync complicated or unfeasible. I’m looking services that offer 2TB+ storage and, so far, the only solution that I find promising is Amazon S3. The problem is price. Keeping 2,048GB of data stored in Amazon S3 costs me about $300 USD per month, plus a one-time cost for uploading the data. At that price, for a whole year, I can buy a QNAP TS-809 filled with 8 x 1.5TB disks

So, unfortunately for me, multi-terabyte back-up copies to the Internet are still to expensive. Perhaps, in 5 years, technology will drive prices down such as that I can afford to keep my back-ups on the Internet.