Avast Antivirus, now with free remote reset option.<p>I always hated anti virus packages both for the fact that AV vendors profit on something that shouldn't be required in the first place and because that software tends to hook into lots of places in the OS so <i>if</i> a backdoor is found you are immediately in big trouble.
No one gets fired for installing Antivirus on every computer. From my experience enterprise IT is driven by checklist, looks good on paper, cover-my-* decisions. People are not interested in doing the right thing in large companies.<p>In one company every developer was forced on Antivirus without file exceptions making compilations a huge pain.
Adobe deserve a pile of the blame here for the pdf spec - it only requires the magic to appear in the first 1024 bytes[1] (and that %EOF appears in the last 1024) - thus allowing silly tricks like PDFs that are also another file type [2].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_reference_1-7.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/acrobat/pdf...</a> section 3.4.1<p>[2] <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/ange4771/a-binary-chimera" rel="nofollow">https://www.slideshare.net/ange4771/a-binary-chimera</a>
This is probably a dumb question: but how does someone look at the source code for a commercial product like Avast? Some sort of DLL decompiler or something? If that is the case are things like function and variable names conserved? This is probably super trivial, but reverse engineering / pen testing isn't my area.
I am very surprised by the strong interest in this kind of work, and I appreciate it a lot!<p>I would love to hear some feedback, in the hope that the following posts will be more enjoyable than this first one.
Take a lesson - always write parsers in C and then execute them as root, and be sure to send as much malicious content to them as possible. Bonus points for hooking it up to the internet.