i wouldn't bet on it

last year cryptography professor matthew green made a bet with mikko hypponen that by the 15th of this month there would be a snowden doc released that showed that US AV companies collaborated with the NSA. he has since accepted that he lost the bet to mikko, but should he have?

i mentioned to matthew the case of mcafee being in bed with government malware writing firm hbgary and mikko chimed in that hbgary wasn't an AV company and being partners with them wasn't enough to win the bet. aside from the fact that this is the first time after all these years that i've seen a member of the AV industry publicly comment on the relationship between mcafee and hbgary (i guess managing matthew's perception of AV is more important than managing mine), something about mikko's response rang hollow.

one way to interpret the situation with hbgary is to view them as government contractors whom mcafee endorsed, advertised, and helped get their code onto the systems of mcafee's customers (hbgary makes a technology that integrates with mcafee's endpoint security product). that certainly would have given hbgary access to systems and organizations they might have had difficulty getting otherwise. i have no idea if that access was ever used in an offensive way, though, so this line of thought is a little iffy.

another way to interpret the situation is to directly contradict mikko and admit that hbgary is a member of the AV industry. after all, they make and sell technology that integrates into an endpoint security product. they may only be on the fringe of the industry, but what more do you have to do to be a member of the industry than make and sell technology for fighting malware? the fact that they also made malware for the government makes them essentially a US AV company that collaborated with the government in one of the worst ways possible.

i feel like this should be enough to have won matthew green the bet, at least in spirit, but the letter of the bet was apparently that a snowden doc would reveal it and the revelation about mcafee and hbgary actually predates snowden's leaks by a number of years. 

so, the question becomes are there any companies that happen to be members of the AV industry and also happen to have been fingered by a snowden leak? it turns out there was (at least) one. they were probably forgotten because they're not just an AV vendor, but AV vendor does happen to be one of the many hats that microsoft wears (plenty of security experts were even advising people to drop their paid-for AV in favour of microsoft's offering at one point in time), and microsoft was most certainly fingered by snowden docs. the instances where microsoft helped the government may not have involved their anti-malware department, but the fact remains that a company that is a member of the AV industry was revealed by snowden documents to have collaborated with the government.

i imagine mikko could find a way to argue this doesn't count either - i admit it's not air-tight - but given how close it meets both the spirit and (as i understand it) the letter of the bet, i think mikko should match the sum he had matthew pay to the EFF and pay it to an organization of matthew's choosing. i won't bet on that happening, though.

ethical conflict in the anti-malware domain

forgive my silence over the last little while. motivation to blog sometimes isn't easy to find. as time wears on, fewer and fewer things get under my skin enough to drive me to rant (is that what it means to mellow with age?). but since you're reading this i think you can guess what this post infers.

five years ago i wrote a post about what i perceived as an ethical conflict in the anti-'rootkit' domain. it detailed the actions of two of the most notorious names in stealthkit research, jamie butler and greg hoglund, and how they were profiting from making a particular niche of the malware problem more popular (and thus, inevitably a bigger problem).

one of the things i pointed out was that symantec was working with a start-up company (komoku) that had jamie butler (author of what was at one time one of the most widely deployed stealthkits around) as it's chief technology officer. i thought the fact that an anti-malware company was in bed with a company that hired such a high profile malware writer deserved at least a moment of reflection, considering the hard-line stance anti-malware companies take on hiring malware writers themselves. at the end of the day, mind you, that start-up was focused on prevention so maybe the argument could be made that mr. butler had or was trying to reform in some way. (mr. butler has since moved on to mandiant, along with his disciple {the FU2 to butler's FU} peter silberman)

when i read earlier this past week that another anti-malware company (mcafee) had been working with greg hoglund's company (hbgary) i thought it an interesting historical footnote but paid little attention to it beyond that (though, if i had remembered that mcafee had once been pointing fingers at rootkitDOTcom, maybe the hypocrisy would have stood out more). after all, little attention seemed to be paid to such connections five years ago so why should this time be any different? well, that was before i knew what hbgary was in to.

apparently, on top of the legitimate work that one can find out about by visiting the hbgary website (which of course i won't link to), it appears that hbgary also writes and sells malware for fairly large sums of money. the customers for their malware include the government/military but might not stop there. even if that set of customers does stop there, hbgary appears to be in the high-end commercial malware business.

so where does that leave mcafee? it leaves them in bed with commercial malware writers. while AV companies have been proclaiming for decades that they don't and won't hire malware writers, apparently they don't have to. they can simply partner with the boutique security shops that do. clearly they are not picking their business associates as carefully as they are their actual employees.

and then there's the claim that surfaces from time to time that AV companies won't make special provisions to keep malware deployed by the authorities from getting detected. what's the point of making such a claim if you're just going to turn around and do business with the company that may very well be making said malware?

how many other AV companies, besides mcafee, were or are in bed with hbgary? how many are in bed with companies LIKE hbgary? where's their ethical high horse when it comes to partnerships? why wasn't the "malware writers need not apply" policy updated when commercial malware became the norm and presented the loophole we see before us today?

some AV companies are rewarding malware writers financially. it may not be in the ways we traditionally thought of, but with the #2 company in the industry involved in this practice (and arguably the #1 company as well, depending on where you want to draw the line), the end result is AV companies contributing to the commercial success of malware writers, and that is not ok at all.

what is a malware writer?

like a virus writer, a malware writer is someone who writes/programs malware. nothing more, nothing less.

the term malware writer is essentially the same as virus writer, only more general to include those who write non-viral malware.

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