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ForgottenSeer 72227
With all due respect, I have access to a lot of intelligence services which provide me with samples recently found in the wild - collected through numerous sources such as their own connections, honey-pots and manual hunting - and the 1,000,000+ samples I receive monthly as part of having the resources I have claim otherwise. A majority of them are targeted towards people irrespective of whether they are a home or business consumer.
The sample collections are not always completely unique. Normally, uniqueness ranges between 100,000-300,000 samples. However, that's still a lot of unique samples being recently found in the wild.
VirusTotal Intelligence is one of my favorite because of the YARA rules feature - it allows me to setup a collection of YARA rules which will be applied on VirusTotal files with real-time scanning support. In layman's terms, it allows me to find fresh samples of a particular malware family/variant if the signature still matches once that sample finds its way onto VirusTotal. Furthermore, this can be used to setup "heuristic" signatures so you can find new files which are likely going to be malicious.
No offense taken!
Your points are valid and correct. Just to clarify my point, as I may not have made it clear and I apologize for that.
It is not to say that home users do not get infected, nor is it to say that hackers don't create malware for general purposes with no specific target, it was more to highlight that home users aren't the subject of advanced targeted attacks that businesses and governments are. With impromvents to the overall security of Windows, browsers, etc... home users are far better off than what it use to be like. More often than not home users are infected because of what they were doing (ie: opening email attachments, downloading cracks/pirated software, clicking on ads, etc...), not because hackers decided to imploy an advanced attack on them. So when I say that the landscape is changing, it is because hackers save their best tools for business and governments, not home users as it will be found far more quickly if they did. Also if you look at it, hackers wanting to steal someone's CC info probably wont waste their time trying to infect hone users one by one, instead they will either break into the vendor's network and steal it, or they will hijack the website, thus stealing the info as the user types it in, meanwhile no security product on the home user's computer can stop/prevent this. It's why I said its all about efficiency for them.
In light of the topic of this thread I do believe that for the most part home users practicing safe habits will probably never get infected. Doesn't mean it still cannot happen, but the chances will be very low IMO. Therefore yes I do think that it's still better to be safe than sorry to have an AV for home users, but one may not need those massive suites, or 100 security programs/extensions to keep them safe, as they will never be subject to the same type of malware attacks that businesses are, well at least that's how I feel.
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