F-Secure Ultralight

upnorth

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Quote : In a day, we see about 7 billion events, 6 billion online reputation queries, 1 million suspicious URLs, 500 000 samples for analysis, and around 10 000 new malware. Endpoint protection solutions have transformed over the years. Early protection solutions employed anti-virus scanners designed to detect malware in files by checking for simple signatures stored in a local database. By 2006, this approach started to dwindle in effectiveness due to the rise in server-side polymorphic malware. The signature approach of yesteryears was easy to defeat; it was trivial to test samples against a scan engine and modify them until they were no longer detected.

The traditional file scanning approach is still in use in most endpoint protection solutions to this day as part of a wider toolset of protection technologies. Scanning engines have evolved to augment the simple signature approach with more complex detection logic based on parsers, disassemblers, and emulators. File scanning engines can still be an effective tool against the everexpanding pool of known threats. Nowadays, they are even optimized for speed, and is the remaining protection layer when no network connection is available on the local device.

Modern endpoint protection suites employ a multilayered approach to providing security. Technologies such as network filtering and scanning, behavioral analysis, and URL filtering augment traditional file scanning components. These different protection features are built into F-Secure Ultralight in a multilayered design, so that if a threat escapes one layer, there is still another layer that can catch it. And as the threat landscape changes, some layers may be removed or new ones may be added both in the endpoints and in the F-Secure Security Cloud.

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What is F-Secure Ultralight?

Ultralight is an all-in-one package that contains F-Secure’s full endpoint protection stack. Ultralight provides a new, modern take on protecting devices in an intelligent and proactive way against the threats we see in the real world. It represents a fundamental breakthrough, not only in the way we protect our customers, but also in the way we work here at F-Secure. With the introduction of Ultralight, we have gained a wealth of new possibilities for protecting our customers now and in the future. Ultralight fully leverages the intelligence of F-Secure’s Security Cloud at the endpoint. Security Cloud is a threat analysis and repository system operated by F-Secure Corporation that provides a wide range of services to security products. Unlike traditional anti-virus solutions that receive periodic database updates and can go hours or days before they are protected against new threats, Ultralight’s direct connection to F-Secure’s cloud provides minute-to-minute protection for all users.

How does Ultralight work?

Ultralight combines all of the technologies present in F-Secure’s full endpoint protection stack into a single package. It consists of a number of drivers, engines, and system services that provide mechanisms to protect both a device and its users. Ultralight provides traditional anti-virus functionality, such as real-time file scanning and network scanning. In addition, it includes modern, proactive protection technologies that aim to stop zeroday exploits and stay ahead of new attacks. F-Secure’s Security Cloud provides Ultralight components with realtime information as the threat landscape changes.

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Overview of the components that make up Ultralight.

Ultralight Core

Ultralight Core consists of a set of components including a driver (Gatekeeper) responsible for filesystem interception and a set of services and components that host all other Ultralight technologies. In addition, it provides a common communication layer between all components, performance optimization mechanisms, and several basic protection services. As the name suggests, Ultralight Core supplies all the underpinnings required for Ultralight’s technology stack to run.

Network Interception Framework (NIF)

Our Network Interception Framework is responsible for analyzing network traffic. It is used primarily to prevent exploit technologies from working and to prevent bots from connecting to command and control infrastructure.
  • Utilizes cloud URL reputation queries to prevent a customer machine from contacting malicious or compromised sites.
  • Prevents unknown sites from serving Flash, Java, Silverlight, or PDF files (exploit kits and other attack servers commonly use totally unknown fresh domains).
  • Scans network traffic for exploits and known malware.
  • Detects and blocks SSL MITM attacks performed by invasive governments by using SSL certificate reputation and analysis.
  • Rapid detection of new exploit kit hosting sites via co-operation with Security Cloud and URL reputation rapid feedback mechanisms.
  • Prevents known botnet command and control domains from working by querying URL reputation before allowing the DNS query.
  • Facilitates banking protection functionality by isolating only trusted content during a banking session.
  • Prevents users from accessing webpages associated with malicious certificates.
  • Prevents users from accessing unwanted or disturbing content.
  • Exploit and malware scan engine
  • F-Secure’s advanced scan engine. It is primarily used for exploit detection, file scanning and memory scanning.
  • Detects malware from active process memory.
  • Detects exploits and exploit kits.
  • Detects prevalent malware and attack scripts.
  • Detects on-the-wire exploits and malware (via NIF).
  • Identifies file types.
  • Provides several parsers for file formats commonly used by malware.
  • Provides file unpackers and de-obfuscators.
  • Provides archive traversal mechanisms
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Full whitepaper :

 

Lenny_Fox

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Why do antivirus marketeers use previous century advertising tactics? In Dutch "3B's = Behoefte - Belofte - Bewijs" Or in English "Nail the need, claim your domain of excellence and proof your promise"

F-secure marketing done right said:
  • Effective protection against custom malware.
  • The more a malicious file has been modified to evade signature-based scanning, the more suspicious it looks to us.
As you can see the promise (first bullet) is followed by an explanation (second bullet) to proof that this promise makes sense.



F-secure clumsy claim marketing said:
  • Our exploit protection focuses on prevention of the exploit phase itself.
  • The way exploit writers typically modify their code to evade signature-based scans cannot bypass our exploit detection techniques.
  • Exploit protection is constantly improved and tweaked as we collect more samples and refine the behavioral detection.
First bullet, OK prevention is better than the cure, but that is something all AV's claim to do, meaning it is a "So what? claim". After this weak non differentiating verbal vomit, the Fsecure marketeer probably must have felt a need to over compensate this with 'circelar reasoning". The second bullet claim simply tells us "because malware writers are stupid, I am perfect". Because this benefit is attributed to a weakness of malware writers, all other AV's could make use of this weakness also. So this bold claim proofs nothing and is immediately weakoned by the third buller telling "we are constantly improving". Why bother to improve at all when F-secure is perfect?

A classic example of makes no sense marketing. :ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:
 
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upnorth

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Hmm, makes me recall another member saying almost the exact same thing in another thread of mine. Curious indeed.

But yeah I understand the opinion as I even can partially share it. Marketing is marketing either it's food, drinks, cars etc and in this case a F-Secure product. Personal I don't mind but I also find the shallow explanations interesting as this is the first time I stumbled over anything about Ultralight. That's also a reason why I share.

All companies, vendors and developers makes too bold statements. It's part of the business and they all want to be the best. For example I saw yesterday an email vendor located in Germany claim, the world's most secure. Sure sure. Marketing and most people I know also understand that.
 

Lenny_Fox

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Disclaimer: the critique is not targetted at F-secure specific, most AV-companies seem to use this tactics. On the other hand (to the defense of AV-marketeers) when we look at the succes of Cylance using its roadshow (a staged variant of the old school Pepsi taste comparative test), the corporate/business target audience seems receptive to these messages.

@upnorth highlighted AV-marketeers in my first post
 
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Sunshine-boy

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Sorry i though this thread is about the ultra light ver of F-secure. there was a free AV called F-secure ultralight i just checked my beta account and its still there but i dk if its working or the protection modules got updates. any idea?

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Nightwalker

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Sorry i though this thread is about the ultra light ver of F-secure. there was a free AV called F-secure ultralight i just checked my beta account and its still there but i dk if its working or the protection modules got updates. any idea?

View attachment 266505

Captura de tela 2022-05-09 204108.jpg

 
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upnorth

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Sorry i though this thread is about the ultra light ver of F-secure. there was a free AV called F-secure ultralight i just checked my beta account and its still there but i dk if its working or the protection modules got updates. any idea?
As you know by now, it's a project that was closed 2019, but if you are still a bit curious what went on from it's start (2014) until ended I can recommend check out the correct thread that for example shows the UI etc.
 

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