*Well, this should mark the end of an era. An era when guys with PCs could imagine themselves to be electronic-frontier Jeffersonian yeoman in robust charge of their own security.
*Maybe if you built that computer entirely yourself, and used a microscope to check all the Chinese circuits for fake circuitry, and you never hook it up to any network and you never put a thumb-drive in it. THEN it's a "safe" computer, but for the time being, the spooks rule cyberspace. You'll never really know who's in your "personal" computer, why they're in there, or what they're up to, and there's no amount of money you can spend on security software that will clean that up.
*Better yet, that situation was directly brought to you by the War on Weapons of Mass Destruction. It's the shadow of the Bomb, bringing back its native Cold War atmosphere of all-pervasive subversion. Score one for the nation-state. They can't make the Homeland safe, but they can make the Net a battleground.
https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/06/internet-security-fail/
(...)
"The truth is, consumer-grade antivirus products can’t protect against targeted malware created by well-resourced nation-states with bulging budgets. They can protect you against run-of-the-mill malware: banking trojans, keystroke loggers and e-mail worms.
"But targeted attacks like these go to great lengths to avoid antivirus products on purpose. And the zero-day exploits used in these attacks are unknown to antivirus companies by definition. As far as we can tell, before releasing their malicious codes to attack victims, the attackers tested them against all of the relevant antivirus products on the market to make sure that the malware wouldn’t be detected. They have unlimited time to perfect their attacks. It’s not a fair war between the attackers and the defenders when the attackers have access to our weapons.
(((I'd also point out that intelligence agencies can bribe, abduct and blackmail your personnel, and you don't have access to those weapons either. That's because you are a teensy computer company and they are intelligence agencies worried about nuclear weapons, which they also have, and you also don't have. Where is the parity here?)))
"Antivirus systems need to strike a balance between detecting all possible attacks without causing any false alarms. And while we try to improve on this all the time, there will never be a solution that is 100 percent perfect. The best available protection against serious targeted attacks requires a layered defense, with network intrusion detection systems, whitelisting against known malware and active monitoring of inbound and outbound traffic of an organization’s network.
(((Don't forget the threat of your chief technical officer showing up with a thumb-drive from his high-tech girlfriend Anna Chapman. Also, they won't have much trouble silently breaking into your house and copying the contents of your laptop.)))
"This story does not end with Flame. It’s highly likely there are other similar attacks already underway that we haven’t detected yet. Put simply, attacks like these work.
"Flame was a failure for the antivirus industry. We really should have been able to do better. But we didn’t. We were out of our league, in our own game."
