In the end, for better or for worse, I think it's important that we actually own the devices we buy and pay for.
But this is more akin buying a car and discovering the manufacturer has a master key and a representative can come over and drive it around whenever he/she wants, and it's fully legal and you can't do anything about it. True, something like anti-virus software self-updating and removing a threat would be acceptable to most users. While the intention was definitely good, I personally would not want to use a machine that the could be remotely accessed in such a mannter. Publicly available tools that can be used for good or bad are hijacked by viruses all the time, and it's never a surprise if an anti-virus removes that tool when the virus specific files are removed. Because of the unique install directory, there wasn't even a remote chance for false positives. If a PC was infected with Sefnit and had the signature old version of Tor in the hidden location, Tor was removed because it's logically the case that Tor was just part of the virus payload. An outdated and vulnerable version of Tor was hidden in a "location that almost no human user would" These weren't dedicated Tor nodes that were taken offline because they were being used for malicious purposes, these were infected PCs with a virus that used Tor as the communication protocol. "the total number of computers on the Tor network ballooned from 1 million to 5.5 million as Sefnit spread"
Microsoft almost certainly used the Microsoft Security Essential update to kill Sefnit, as they do with so many other viruses. This doesn't sound much different to any other anti-virus removal.
0 kommentar(er)
