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Created: Friday, August 11 2006 23:21.10 CDT

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AV Companies: Learn to CODE!

Author: AlexIonescu

# Views: 2233

I am getting sick of all this FUD online about companies being "unable to innovate" and being "hindered by Microsoft" because Patchguard got downgraded to XP/2K3 SP1.

Patchguard, if you don't know already, is a wonderful obfuscated system that Microsoft added to the kernel to block three things:
1) Rootkits [good]
2) Hobby hooking [bad, but just makes it more fun to try and disable it -- or connect a debugger, and it auto-disables!]
3) Idiotic commercial AV/Firewall/etc (Daemon Tools) code [GOOD].

These guys never took the time to read a book on how to, say, properly hook FS/IO operations and use proper filter drivers, or how to use image creation notification routines, or the myriad of other documented and valid methods of hooking that Windows NT supports. They instead chose to say F*ck it to everything, find some rootkit code online, and adapt it to fit their purposes.

So yes, I'm glad that Patchguard will make these companies force themselves to TRAIN their developers so they can have a CLUE about how to code kernel-mode drivers without messing up your computer. God, go read uninformed.org for the latest horror stories... AV drivers that edit Ring 0 memory tables to make them accessible from Ring 3. 5 buffer overflows in 20 lines of code, local privilege escalation bugs by the buecket, it only gets worse. These drivers are pests and Microsoft is doing a good job to wiping them out.

For malware developers and hobby development, this only makes it more fun for us, since Patchguard is relatively easy to disable and/or bypass, and it also makes for something fun to reverse (again, see uninformed).

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