Avast, mateys

[darkmatter]

Not only is their antivirus shit, so is their website.

also, if you post to their comments page with success=anything, it assumes you posted something and toasters you.

https://blog.avast.com/petya-based-ransomware-using-eternalblue-to-infect-computers-around-the-world?success=wtf,seriously? (also i like how the ? at the end breaks 1boxing on this forum, cool)

Petya-based ransomware using EternalBlue to infect computers around the world

Petya-based ransomware is spreading and infecting computers around the world.

interestingly, the value of success= is irrelevant on the page output, it shows the same toaster for true and false and FILE_NOT_FOUND

[darkmatter]

@darkmatter
also from their blog

Of course human analysts can analyze files to determine whether they’re malicious or not, but this requires that they analyze the files’ code, checking if they have malicious characteristics. Analyzing every file this way is physically impossible, considering we see more than a million new files every day. You wouldn’t want a malware scanner or malware remover that relied on human power alone.
Computers, on the other hand, are good at crunching numbers. To make them do what analysts used to do manually, we’ve created algorithms that convert files into suitable numeric representations. These machine learning algorithms extract certain characteristics, or “fingerprints,” from the files they receive. What gets extracted is much smaller than the original files, thus suitable for massive processing and – especially important – quick decision-making.

nice little explanation on why AntiVirus software ends up accidentally quarantining critical windows files as bad and breaking users' windows PCs.

[Tsaukpaetra]

@darkmatter said in Avast, mateys:

convert files into suitable numeric representations

TDEMSYR!

I'm assuming they mean "hash" here, but the next sentence indicates they're talking about the heuristics detection?

[Magus]

I've always had a soft spot for them, ever since they added 'pirate' to their list of languages.

[Arantor]

I really need to write up the horror story I have with Avast sometime over their forum that happens to be the same software I used to be a dev of, and what I found when they'd been hacked.

[marczellm]

@arantor said in Avast, mateys:

I really need to write up the horror story I have with Avast sometime over their forum that happens to be the same software I used to be a dev of, and what I found when they'd been hacked.

Please do.