Cylance Smart Antivirus

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davisd said:
Could you please be more mature. I appreciate your input, but you pretend to know better how Cylance works than company itself. I understand what you are saying about Cylance and your feelings and protection capabilities towards their products, but you are going personal to it's users now. I am not mentally attached to them nor defending them, but looks like you want another Cylance's thread locked. Some actually wants to learn something about their new product for home users here and read valuable feedback. Thank you. :emoji_pray:
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There is nothing immature about what I said. Cylance's greatest effort is in its marketing. This is well-known. This has been discussed many times here and a lot of other places. But here, people want to believe that Cylance has made a better mousetrap. What Cylance is, is a decent, basic antivirus. I've used it.

What is being covered here has already been covered all over the net during the past few years. There is nothing new being presented here. That's because the home user product is not a new product. It is merely a re-branded CylancePROTECT with less access to the web console.

No one is attempting to have this thread locked. What's going on in this thread is merely discussion of a lot of different topics. A lot of it is general talk. There has been no bashing here whatsoever.
 
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rsonic said:
I'd love to use Avast, but they had to have those shady practices of harvesting information? Even that kerfuffle about the browser extension? Even if I pay for it, I find it hard to trust them.
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For this reason Avast is unusable by many. They're just too shady. I mentioned a cast study we did over a long period. Avast free was sufficient to protect 'average' users computers over a long period without any other assistance and did better than I expected. However because of those shady practices - I don't consider it.
 
Lockdown said:
No one is attempting to have this thread locked. What's going on in this thread is merely discussion of a lot of different products. A lot of it is general talk. There has been no bashing here whatsoever.
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I think this thread has been fantastic.

As I noted early on, guys at work 'shredded' Cylance when it was used alone. Which is why I said I do not believe the product offers sufficient protection to be the sole deployed solution. It's pretty clear with the first hub results that this is indeed the case. I do not believe Cylance offers enough protection from a wide range of threat vectors to be used in such a fashion.

Cylance does have a tendency to find some really odd and well constructed malware when other products fail, but it also has many threat vectors where it doesn't even try to address. Their technology would be ripe to be licensed and as an inclusion in something else for sure. Which is where I think they are going with firms like Watchguard.
 
rsonic said:
I'd love to use Avast, but they had to have those shady practices of harvesting information? Even that kerfuffle about the browser extension? Even if I pay for it, I find it hard to trust them.
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Unfortunately I think it has turned quite a few people off from Avast. It's sad in a way because protection wise its a very capable product. I know in life that nothing is ever truly free, you pay for it in some fashion and in this case its your data. Personally I've always felt that Avast gave a lot in the free version and I've always wondered if it was going to be sustainable in the long term, but I guess they found a way ;)

If I'm not mistaken though Evjl's Rain posted somewhere on this forum a way on how to block this tracking if you wanted to use Avast.
 
ForgottenSeer 58943 said:
I think this thread has been fantastic.

As I noted early on, guys at work 'shredded' Cylance when it was used alone. Which is why I said I do not believe the product offers sufficient protection to be the sole deployed solution. It's pretty clear with the first hub results that this is indeed the case. I do not believe Cylance offers enough protection from a wide range of threat vectors to be used in such a fashion.

Cylance does have a tendency to find some really odd and well constructed malware when other products fail, but it also has many threat vectors where it doesn't even try to address. Their technology would be ripe to be licensed and as an inclusion in something else for sure. Which is where I think they are going with firms like Watchguard.
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Yeah, well, these forum discussions aren't normal human conversations. So it isn't unusual to see people to mis-interpret something (actually, they assign the meaning that they want it to have (someone famously did that every time); they have crystal balls and know the poster's intent) that was posted, take offense, start reporting every other post, and then staff locks the thread. People getting offended here just proves what I said earlier about people being too emotionally involved with this stuff.

You have stated what is needed to bolster Cylance. It is the kind of sound advice that one could not expect to be any better. However, not one person - that I have seen - has bothered to ask you to go into those points deeper. What most thread watchers are focused upon is the tangential discussion... and immediately jump-in saying that it is Cylance or thread bashing. Nothing could be further from reality. It supports the claim that people are less about learning than "What's the best AV ?" "Oh look, a new soft... I will install it." And 15 minutes later they are promoting it on the forums. Mind you, this has happened on the forums ad infinitum. It has nothing to do with Cylance or any other product.

People read and assign the meaning that they wish. And ignore or write-off everything else. I've been on the forums long enough to know the general behaviors. I don't know about anyone else, but many times I have to read, re-read, and re-re-read posts sometimes... in an attempt to figure out what the poster is saying or, more importantly, what they are intending to say. And that is what myself and @illumination have been really talking about... these issues that seem to never go away. I don't think things will ever improve. Not that they can be improved. It's just commentary.
 
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Kubla said:
Is not a "better mousetrap" the whole point of AI based AV?

By design it should find and zap mice and mice variants before they ever get caught by or get around a traditional mousetrap (AV).
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Better mousetrap than whom?

F-Secure blocked 11/17, McAfee 8/17. The avast test had 6 of those blocked by system hardener. Why are we including a secondary tool in a comparative av test?

Comprobantepagoenviadoasucuenta.vbs, which I'm assuming is Comprobante.vbs, one of the hits Cylance missed, straight up didn't work for the defender test. Either that's an aspect of the hardened windows defender kicking in - and again most home-users are not hardening their defender - or the malware is broken.

I'm not seeing an exe file that Cylance missed, if it's there and I'm just missing it, please point it out to me.

So in order to get a bloated, borderline scareware product like Avast to get that 16/17 detection, it needed a third party tool.

Since were basing the strength of a product on a single test, it's made a better mousetrap than F-secure, McAfee, arguably Avast absent system hardener. (and it's doing this at just about half the price of F-Secure btw)

Kaspersky has always had a great detection rate. But there's the trade off that you have to use Kaspesky to get it.
 
Kubla said:
By design it should find and zap mice and mice variants before they ever get caught by or get around a traditional mousetrap (AV).
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Who made a thought that "by design" full ML/AI security product based on mathematics will be an cure to ever existed and new form of malware? Cylance marketing claims? Cylance isn't something superior among other AV products, in simple words I look at their technology just as another technique and approach to detect malware. I find it pretty cool. Why some make so high expectations of Cylance Smart AV? They clearly says they protect only from PE's. I start to feel that some want to get some extraordinary juice out of it that it doesn't actually have. It does protect from treats they claim to.
 
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Let's remember, Cylance basically did 16/17 on this test. It just missed a script. There was no missing EXE, and the console logs I have prove this.

It's only weakness in the test was what we already knew it would struggle with. VBA/JAR scripts. If you remove those from the equation it would have scored 100%. But this should come as no surprise. However any script has a purpose, to download payloads or whatever, right? Well those would be blocked by Cylance and execution would fail on any subsequent arriving malware from the scripts.

This test is pretty impressive in that it illustrates that an AI/ML product with no adjunct technologies, no signatures and zero bloat can score near perfect. Now if you pair it with Syshardener like Evijl does with Avast, then retest. Cylance should easily score 100%. Since Syshardener is easy to deploy and causes no issues, it's pretty apparent Cylance would make a great combo with just that.
 
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artek said:
Since were basing the strength of a product on a single test, it's made a better mousetrap than F-secure, McAfee, arguably Avast absent system hardener. (and it's doing this at just about half the price of F-Secure btw)
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I guess you don't understand the point of me testing avast with syshardener but not other AV with syshardener
it's because avast has hardened mode with can deal with malicious exe malwares while syshardener blocks all scripts, in which field avast is not good at
cylance > avast alone but cylance+syshardener < avast+syshardener
for get about other stuffs like privacy. I'm taking about the protection and the way they work

looking forward to the next cylance tests as 1 test won't tell much
 
Evjl's Rain said:
I guess you don't understand the point of me testing avast with syshardener but not other AV with syshardener
it's because avast has hardened mode with can deal with malicious exe malwares while syshardener blocks all scripts, in which field avast is not good at
cylance > avast alone but cylance+syshardener < avast+syshardener
for get about other stuffs like privacy. I'm taking about the protection and the way they work

looking forward to the next cylance tests as 1 test won't tell much
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Does Avast tweaked up as you have in hardened mode deal with unknown exe's? That's obviously Cylance's strength. So I suspect Avast all tweaked up with Syshardener is probably equivalent to Cylance+Syshardener if it can deal with unknowns. The biggest thing though, Cylance+Syshardener would be far better to use for zero system weight and extreme privacy - as you mentioned.
 
ForgottenSeer 58943 said:
Does Avast tweaked up as you have in hardened mode deal with unknown exe's? That's obviously Cylance's strength. So I suspect Avast all tweaked up with Syshardener is probably equivalent to Cylance+Syshardener if it can deal with unknowns. The biggest thing though, Cylance+Syshardener would be far better to use for zero system weight and extreme privacy - as you mentioned.
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avast's hardened mode works like a smartscreen-like anti-exe solely for .exe extension so it can block any exe malware which has low number of users or bad reputation. If the exe is safe and has sufficient number of users, it will be unblocked after 1-3 days automatically according to my experience of 4 years with avast
in fact, I can disable everything in avast and just leave hardened mode enabled + syshardener, they would score the same
I don't believe it because cylance should miss some exe malwares
here are 2 tests of cylance in the past in which cylance missed some exe malwares
https://malwaretips.com/threads/7-05-2018-15.83037/#post-734093
https://malwaretips.com/threads/mixed-threats-14-04-05-2018.82928/#post-733364

p/s: if we use windows 10 with smartscreen (supported by Run-by-smartscreen by @Andy_Ful) + syshardener and only execute files downloaded from the internet, they would protect us up to 98% because smartscreen is great against unknown malwares, especially .exe malwares
I only saw a few exe malware malwares bypassing smartscreen
 
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I get why you'd want to test that, and you're contributing a great deal to the community. But there are people here jumping up and down to argue that it's not providing a comparable level of protection to other anti-malware vendors, and some are looking at just the vendor name and the number, not the configuration, so I think it's useful to highlight that it's not Avast alone that's working well. If you want to run systhardner in addition to Avast, or whatever other third party tool, I'm not telling you not to. I just think it's a tad hypocritical to pile onto Cylance for their "AI" special sauce, when almost every other vendor advertises towards security theater in much of the same way. Especially when some of these additional "features" break system security in a profound way.
 
It would be wise to wait for more than a single test to make assumptions. Statistically, a missing sample means nothing at this point. In theory though syshardener or osa will solve any script issues. Maybe cylance can switch that account to no script policy but it might not be convenient for everyday usage depending on the user.
 
davisd said:
Who exactly believes that here?
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There have been people. Read the old MalwareManaged and other threads involving Ai from a year or two ago. And it didn't just involve Cylance. There were people here that kept promoting their Ai or any Ai as the next best thing to money... which is a falsehood.
 
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