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Your antivirus is dangerous. I'll lay all my cards on the table.
Greetings to all, dear friends!
I doubt that most of you, my dear subscribers, have ever had mistrust of software whose main declared function is to protect the user. But it's not that simple...
When it comes to methods of protecting the system from external threats, the first thing that comes to mind is installing an antivirus. It is understandable, because their advertising has flooded the Internet, and everyone has already gotten used to the image of an antivirus as a system protector.
However, in reality, antiviruses themselves can be very dangerous. When installed in a system, they receive the highest rights and can manage almost all resources and settings of the system, and all this under the pretext of providing protection to the user.
As they say, with great power comes great responsibility. And as we know, large companies often have problems with the privacy of personal data.
An example of such problems is the incident with Uber. Then it became known that the employees of this company had the ability to track the location of users without their knowledge. The device sends data about the current location when ordering a taxi. At first glance, there is nothing strange about this, because you need to know where to send the car. But, as it turned out, the employees had access to this information and could track the users of the service. Moreover, the data on the location continued to be sent even after the end of the trip. Why Uber needed such a function is still unclear.
So remember: you can't give the app access to information that is excessive for its operation. Even if you 100% trust the person who receives your data, this does not mean that you are safe. Unlike Uber, which developed its own surveillance tools, Apple has not had such problems. However, everyone knows about the case of the leak of nude celebrity photos from iCloud. This became possible due to a vulnerability in the service that hackers found and exploited. Based on this, do not forget: no matter how good a company's reputation is, there is always a chance that it will be hacked.
The main rule is to trust no one. This is the only way to protect yourself and your data. For example, smartphone apps that allow you to track your traffic so you know where and what it went to are quite popular now. The app gets full access to monitor where you went, what you downloaded, what you entered where. Are you sure you want to share this just to find out how many MB you spent on VKontakte today?
As a result, the hash, the path to the file, its name and the IP of the computer - all this ends up in the hands of Kaspersky Lab. An illustrative case is when people from the authorities contacted a journalist who downloaded virus software files to his computer for personal investigation.
Note: he did not launch them, which means the system was not infected. However, law enforcement somehow got information that these files were on his computer.
Another questionable function is the antivirus's implementation of its scripts into browsers. At the moment, their non-standard behavior has not been recorded, but in any update, modules implementing surveillance can easily be added to them. As is customary for the company, these functions cannot be disabled even by deleting the components.
Moreover, during the update, the antivirus does not simply receive data packets, there is a two-way exchange of information. Moreover, the data sent is in an inaccessible form for reading, which means that during one of these updates, it can easily send any information from the computer and the user will not know anything about it.
After such truth about antiviruses, the best solution will be to refuse to use them. They are not needed if you use the Internet wisely, because most often a virus gets on a computer due to human fault. For an advanced user, an antivirus serves more as a source of threats than as an assistant in the system.
Greetings to all, dear friends!
I doubt that most of you, my dear subscribers, have ever had mistrust of software whose main declared function is to protect the user. But it's not that simple...
When it comes to methods of protecting the system from external threats, the first thing that comes to mind is installing an antivirus. It is understandable, because their advertising has flooded the Internet, and everyone has already gotten used to the image of an antivirus as a system protector.
However, in reality, antiviruses themselves can be very dangerous. When installed in a system, they receive the highest rights and can manage almost all resources and settings of the system, and all this under the pretext of providing protection to the user.
As they say, with great power comes great responsibility. And as we know, large companies often have problems with the privacy of personal data.
An example of such problems is the incident with Uber. Then it became known that the employees of this company had the ability to track the location of users without their knowledge. The device sends data about the current location when ordering a taxi. At first glance, there is nothing strange about this, because you need to know where to send the car. But, as it turned out, the employees had access to this information and could track the users of the service. Moreover, the data on the location continued to be sent even after the end of the trip. Why Uber needed such a function is still unclear.
So remember: you can't give the app access to information that is excessive for its operation. Even if you 100% trust the person who receives your data, this does not mean that you are safe. Unlike Uber, which developed its own surveillance tools, Apple has not had such problems. However, everyone knows about the case of the leak of nude celebrity photos from iCloud. This became possible due to a vulnerability in the service that hackers found and exploited. Based on this, do not forget: no matter how good a company's reputation is, there is always a chance that it will be hacked.
The main rule is to trust no one. This is the only way to protect yourself and your data. For example, smartphone apps that allow you to track your traffic so you know where and what it went to are quite popular now. The app gets full access to monitor where you went, what you downloaded, what you entered where. Are you sure you want to share this just to find out how many MB you spent on VKontakte today?
- Now let's get back to antiviruses. Maybe we can say about them that they have too many rights in the system?
I would like to draw your attention to the fact that this item cannot be disabled in the settings. I wonder why, huh?
As a result, the hash, the path to the file, its name and the IP of the computer - all this ends up in the hands of Kaspersky Lab. An illustrative case is when people from the authorities contacted a journalist who downloaded virus software files to his computer for personal investigation.
Note: he did not launch them, which means the system was not infected. However, law enforcement somehow got information that these files were on his computer.
- “From where?” you ask.
- The answer is very simple: Kaspersky Lab collected this information using the installed antivirus and kindly shared it upon request.
Another questionable function is the antivirus's implementation of its scripts into browsers. At the moment, their non-standard behavior has not been recorded, but in any update, modules implementing surveillance can easily be added to them. As is customary for the company, these functions cannot be disabled even by deleting the components.
Moreover, during the update, the antivirus does not simply receive data packets, there is a two-way exchange of information. Moreover, the data sent is in an inaccessible form for reading, which means that during one of these updates, it can easily send any information from the computer and the user will not know anything about it.
After such truth about antiviruses, the best solution will be to refuse to use them. They are not needed if you use the Internet wisely, because most often a virus gets on a computer due to human fault. For an advanced user, an antivirus serves more as a source of threats than as an assistant in the system.
