US government is now the biggest buyer of malware, Reuters reports

US government is now the biggest buyer of malware, Reuters reports:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/10/4...-threatens-cybersecurity-former-officials-say

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/10/us-usa-cyberweapons-specialreport-idUSBRE9490EL20130510

 

I guess that means they don't know how to write their own...

 

Hahaha..., that's somewhat true if we think about it. I'm pretty sure that they'll give people lots of the so-called legal excuses. Just hopefully no AV vendors will whitelist those government malware like Norton-FBI.

 

Afaik every vendor do add protection against them. At least I have seen no reports so far that says otherwise.

 

Folks at Norton don't think so...

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_antivirus

 

Most of this stuff uses zero-day exploits, right?

 

Yep, it does. According to the article;

Let's see how this offensive mindset plays out.
Like with the current 'online probing' of the main US industrial/energy sector by Iranfrom the Middle East, apparantly looking for potential sabotage targets instead of 'usual' IP theft victims. link.

(edit: In the Reuters article, Hayden comments on all attacks, not just the linked current affair).

 

So they think it's OK for them, but Everybody else musn't do it Oh, & they don't see Any hypocrisy in complaining when they do

What a set of dingbats

 

This is just an extension of physical warfare that the U.S. is widely known for, due to their ideals.

 

That's their attitude to nuclear armaments and biological warfare, so it's no surprise.

 

Norton was never great with keyloggers. I don't have any of the samples anymore because they got deleted but a couple of years ago I had 25 keyloggers and loaded them all in a virtual machine with every AV I could get my hands on at the time. Kaspersky got 23 and Outpost Security suite got 22 of them. Nobody else came close, and Norton detected zero.

Again, I no longer have the files and those product versions would be outdated now so you don't have to give me any credibility on that statement if you don't want to. Just sharing what I found at the time.