The AVIEN Blog

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of blogs and articles attacking and defending AMTSO and their attempt at establishing standards for the testing of counter-malware products. Unfortunately I think BOTH sides are missing the larger picture here. AMTSO was formed to address some critical shortcomings in the testing of counter-malware products: some tests were arguably unethical, most unscientific and some just poor from the word go. So where does the dissent come from? It comes from the very people who done or supported those poor non-science based tests. Yet it goes beyond that. The people who are condemning AMTSO and their efforts are in some cases well respected in the general security arena, and are very knowledgeable, and this is the rub. These people, most people in academia, and in management as well do not recognize Malware research and prevention as a specialty niche. They attempt to apply the same rule-set to fighting a malware outbreak as they do a simple intrusion, and see nothing wrong with that solution.

A majority of people not engaged in the Malware field as a profession still feel that the average Security Professional has the same knowledge and skill sets as used by the Counter Malware Professionals. Unfortunately nothing can be further from the truth. It goes beyond the abilities and skills for reverse engineering, programming, and identifying abnormal network traffic. This argument goes back to at least the early 1990′s when in a panel discussion a firewalls specialist attempted to answer a question about a virus. On that panel was Wolfgang Stiller, creator of Integrity Master Anti-Virus, Wolfgang interrupted him saying along the lines of “look I’m here for the virus questions, I would never presume to speak with authority or experience on firewalls issues, but you presume to have the same experience and expertise with viruses that I do, and that is mistaken”. Similar exchanges have happened on other panels with people such as Robert Vibert and Rob Rosenberger, among others. These are also the same people who demand that anti-malware products protect against threats that are not viruses, nor are they specifically malware, but “Potentially unwanted programs”. So this is not a new phenomenon. The question in my mind is why does it still exist?

Anti-Virus ‘Experts’ helped establish the disaster recovery field, and were among the very first to teach classes in th at subject. It was the Anti-Virus Researchers who developed the field of Computer Forensics, in both cases it was the Anti-Virus field that had the necessary expertise and skill set needed to fill the holes and expand the career field. So now that Disaster Recovery, and Computer Forensics are recognized as specialty fields and given a high degree of respect from schools and management, what happened to the Anti-Virus researcher? Their mindset is not of an operational nature, they bore easily, some may even say they have attention deficit disorder (ADD), yet they are anal about doing things the same way every-time. They dwell on minutiae, arguing to the point of splitting hairs. I sometimes think some of my colleagues can SEE the traffic on the wire in their minds eye. Yet with all this contribution to the Computer Security Community they are still (almost purposely) maligned and misunderstood. At a Virus Bulletin Conference, I stated that we as a community must take action or go from the ranks of professional, to the ranks of the tradesmen. I still don’t know what action that is, or how to go about it, but AMTSO is a good step in that direction, and the naysayers need to start looking outside their comfort zone and realize they know enough to be dangerous and not enough to be helpful at this point.

Ken Bechtel
Team Anti-Virus
Virus Researcher and Security pontificator