Pay Attention To Anti-Virus Logs

I’m often quite critical of anti-virus and it’s poor ability to actually detect most of the viruses that a computer is likely to see in normal operation.  Anti-virus can detect what it can detect, and that means that generally if the AV engine detects malware, the malware was probably blocked from getting a foot hold on the computer.  In my experience, that has lead to apathy towards anti-virus logs: like watching blocked firewall logs, AV logs show you what was successfully blocked.  As I’ve mentioned on my cyber security podcast a number of times, there are a few important reasons to pay attention to those AV logs.

First, AV logs that show detected malware on servers, particularly where the server is not a file server, should prompt some investigation.  Frequently, some of the tools an attacker will try to push to a target server will be caught by an AV engine and deleted or quarantined.  The attacker may have to iterate through a few different tools to find one that is not detected prior to moving forward in the attack.  Paying attention to AV logs in this circumstance provides an opportunity to identify an attack during the early stages.   I’ve seen this technique most effectively used on Internet facing web servers, where almost any AV detection is bound to be an indication of an active attack.

Second, on workstations , AV detection events will necessarily be more common than on non-interactive servers, due to the  nature of email attachments, web browsing, downloads, USB drives and so on.  In this case, it is more reasonable to accept that AV blocked a particular piece of malware, and generally unworkable to chase after each detected event.  However, there are two opportunities to leverage AV logs in this circumstance to shut down infections.  If a particular workstation is detecting many pieces of malware over a relatively short time, this may be an indication that the person using the workstation is doing something inappropriate or that the system has some other undetected malware infection and AV is catching some second order infection attempt.  In either case, the workstation likely deserves a look.

Additionally, on workstations, certain kinds of malware detection events uncovered during full drive scans should warrant a look at the computer.  Frequently, a piece of malware will not be detected at first, but as other organizations find and submit samples of the malware, AV detection will improve and a previously undetected infection is suddenly detected.

I think it’s important to reiterate that AV is not all that effective at preventing malware infections, however most of us have significant investments in our AV infrastructure and we ought to looking for ways to ensure we are getting the best leverage out of the tools that we have deployed in our environments.

Have you found a clever way to use AV?  Post a message below.

Game Theory, Behavioral Economics and Anti-Virus

The information security community continuously laments the ineffectiveness of anti-virus lately.  Report after report indicate that AV catches only between 5% and 55% of malware.  Can any organization justify the cost for such a generally ineffective control?  Symantec themselves has even stated that  the usefulness of AV is waning.

However, when the bill comes for next year’s maintenance on your chosen AV platform, you’re going to pay it, aren’t you?  And so will nearly everyone else.

Why is that?  Behavioral economists categorize a number of cognitive biases in human psychology, such as “herd mentality”.  I suspect that we are inclined to “do what everyone else is doing”, which is indeed to keep AV around.  Another bias is the “sunk cost fallacy”.  We spent a lot of money deploying AV and have spent a lot of money each year since to keep it fed and cared for.  Abandoning AV will be turning our back on the investment we’ve made, even if it would save us money now.

I think that there may be an even stronger game theoretic force at play here.  If I am responsible for security at my organization, I have many factors to consider when prioritizing my spending.  I may fully believe that AV will not provide additional malware protection beyond other controls in place, and therefore I could reallocate the savings from not using AV to some more productive purpose.  However, if there IS an incident involving malware at my organization and I made the choice to not use AV, even if AV  wouldn’t have stopped it, or if the damages suffered were much less than the savings from not using AV, I am probably going to be working on my resume.  Or I assume that I will.

I suspect this is a similar reason why we will not see requirements for AV relaxed in various security standards and frameworks any time soon.  From the perspective of a standards body, there is only downside in removing that requirement:

  • The AV industry, and probably others, may ridicule the standard for not prescribing the mainstay of security controls, which they have a financial incentive to keep in place
  • Organizations following the standard that have malware-related losses may point back to the standard and call it ineffective
  • The standards body generally will not incur costs resulting from including a given control, so removing AV as a requirement is not sensible since it does catch some amount of malware, however small

 

You might be asking: “what exactly are you getting at here?”  I’m not proposing that you, or anyone else dump AV.  I am proposing that we question why things are being done the way they are. As defenders, we have a limited amount of money and time to spend, and we ought to ensure we are prioritizing our security controls based on effectiveness at mitigating risk to our systems and data and not just because it’s what everyone else is doing.

I’ll also say that, if we’re not willing to dump AV, we ought to (at least from time to time) change the nature of the discussions and criticisms of AV into something productive.  For example, if AV is mandatory and it’s not all that effective, we ought to be purchasing the most economical product to save money for other endeavors.  Rather than simply comparing effectiveness rates, we could be considering the cost of effectiveness rates per user.  If I am paying $50/year/user for an AV platform that is 35% effective, it would be good to know that I could pay $25/year/user for one that is 30% effective.  This assumes, of course, that we settle on a standard methodology for rating the effectiveness of AV, which seems like a challenge on its own.