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Antivirus companies support virus writers?

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CoderOmega:
Or home security...do they pay people to rob houses in order to sell more alarm systems?
-app103 (February 12, 2010, 05:54 PM)
--- End quote ---

Where I live, they don't pay people, they do it themselves. Sad but true.
Well not all of them happily.
Oh and the police get a commission for letting the thieves go to.

JavaJones:
The OSX point is definitely a good one against the assertion of the original article. But there may be other reasons for that... The example of physical security companies doing bank robberies falls a lot more into my point about the tire slashing example though. It's a helluvalot harder and more risky to stage robberies to inflate the value of your security service (although I believe even this sort of thing *has* been done in the past!), than it is to anonymously pay cheap virus writers to iterate off of existing virus toolkits in a foreign country outside of our legal jurisdiction and unlikely to ever "whistle blow" to anyone relevant and within ear shot. It just involves a whole lot more headache than the digital equivalent. I bet I could go jump on a rent-a-coder type site right now and find someone willing to do this for a couple hundred bucks within 24 hours. Hehe.

- Oshyan

Bamse:
You can and those people will have tons of tools for Windows, very few for OSX. I don't see why OSX would be attractive or lack of focus proves companies do not fiddle with Windows based malware makers. If X company decide to move in on potential new OSX market it make sense but risk of getting caught is skyhigh. Oh look at all these attacks, where do they come from? So nice our product protects against them all! Way easier to get away with in Windows world :)

f0dder:
app: you do have a point about OSX, but I also think Bamse has a point that it'd be a bit more high-profile and thus carry a potential risk for getting caught - which there's almost zero risk of with Windows, considering the flood of malware that's already written for it. And while OSX certainly has enough security flaws for exploiting, the entry barrier is a bit higher... there's so much more existing crap to pick from on Windows, and a much larger potential user base.

Dmytry:
The OSX point is definitely a good one against the assertion of the original article. But there may be other reasons for that... The example of physical security companies doing bank robberies falls a lot more into my point about the tire slashing example though. It's a helluvalot harder and more risky to stage robberies to inflate the value of your security service (although I believe even this sort of thing *has* been done in the past!), than it is to anonymously pay cheap virus writers to iterate off of existing virus toolkits in a foreign country outside of our legal jurisdiction and unlikely to ever "whistle blow" to anyone relevant and within ear shot. It just involves a whole lot more headache than the digital equivalent. I bet I could go jump on a rent-a-coder type site right now and find someone willing to do this for a couple hundred bucks within 24 hours. Hehe.

- Oshyan
-JavaJones (February 12, 2010, 08:10 PM)
--- End quote ---
For OS X, imho you have all the same reasons which make malware writers not write many viruses for OS X, plus a few extra reasons such as higher risk to get caught, difficulty of hiring third world workforce for mac work (you can bet Apple would work hard to investigate where the viruses come from, should there suddenly be surge of OS X viruses along with marketing campaign for an antivirus). For the rentacoder remark - heh, i've been browsing rentacoder jobs once, and seen more than a few jobs almost certainly involving development of trojan software (private description, required ability to work with gmail, yahoo, facebook etc accounts, network programming experience, and you have to be located in former eastern Soviet block).

What actually prompted my quite angry blog post is an assertion by antivirus company spokeman that there's more virus software being written today than legitimate software.

For whenever it is happening  - look up rogue anti-virus software. It is happening all the time on small scale. The only question, is it happening on large scale. I think yes. I do not believe that a big company would take a lot of hit should they be discovered doing this. Companies routinely break the law in a very nasty way. Look up pfizer off label use. You can enter any other big pharmaceutical company instead of pfizer and see the very same thing. Willful law-breaking in a case where it could not be concealed, but the fine is smaller than revenue from the illegal operation. I do not think anything would happen to McAfee should anything like this be discovered. I guess a huge enough fraction of their users already believe firmly that they make viruses and this is the case of racketeering.
Think about it, back in the mafia days, would you *not* pay to 'security' firm if you know for sure they're the mafia whom are doing the very break-ins that you need protection from? In terms of cyber-crime, it's those mafia days today, with just about every normal user having experienced some form of cyber crime first hand.

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