can anyone share there last windows virus experience?

Gillor

@AndyPix
Ok, for “zero day” read “new/fresh”, and for “outbound communications are blocked” read “outbound rules apply” if you want to be pedantic.

I didn’t realise we were having an argument but if we are going to get personal, if you think that Shadow Defender and Sandboxie is “useless software” you obviously have no idea how either work or are being purposely obtuse – probably the latter I suspect. Why do the words “rattle and “pram” spring to mind.

Anyhow, feed your own ego, I’m out of here before we both get banned.

Gillor

@Stoke

Thanks for your detailed explanation; very enlightening.

But just to be clear, are you saying that if I run say XP in what is, for all intents and purposes, a virtual environment e.g. i.e Shadow Defender/Sandboxie my system is still at permanent risk?

robatwork

1987
Cascade
DOS

https://youtu.be/z7g-v3d7-Gk?t=137

Stoke

Gillor wrote: »

@Stoke

Thanks for your detailed explanation; very enlightening.

But just to be clear, are you saying that if I run say XP in what is, for all intents and purposes, a virtual environment e.g. i.e Shadow Defender/Sandboxie my system is still at permanent risk?

Possibly, it depends. Obviously it's at a significant less risk than an entirely unpatched Windows XP machine, of which there are still too many out there playing around with the world wide web etc.

I've not used Shadow Defender before, but it looks a little like OverlayFS in Linux, so while that should protect the underlying root flesystem from nefarious write activity, is doesn't do anything to protect you from unpatched bugs that may remain within Windows XP. It's also impossible to quantify just how many of those bugs remain, because bugs are found all the time and will be for years to come.... and it's whether those bugs manifest into something more serious. Luckily, in the past, when this has happened Microsoft has actually gone back and fixed OS's they have previously dropped all support for.

From the few minutes I've spent reading up on Shadow Defender and Sandboxie, they achieve roughly the same thing, albeit with slightly different methods. Shadow Defender appears to do an 'OverlayFS' style union mount, with a read-only layer and a read-write layer, whereby the read-write layer is (intentionally) lost on reboot, leaving only the read-only layer which is the optimal setup. Sandboxie appears to sandbox individual applications which is more like a SELinux strategy. Both of these tools will obviously prevent viruses and trojans and malicious software from doing certain things to your root file system, but they're not going to protect against OS specific issues. That isn't what they are designed to do either.

I'll concede that you've obviously thought about this and therefore aren't a complete novice. Your setup will be a lot safer than many other systems out there that continue running XP. However, I really wouldn't go anywhere near suggesting it's truly secure. I would also find it hard to believe that's as secure as Windows 10..... unless Microsoft have really let themselves go again. Never say never though....

Now, if you were running XP as a true VM, I would say go right ahead, just don't ever use that VM for sensitive work, banking, e-mails etc. Just use it for games or whatever reason there is to keep XP. I'm sure you spent time looking at VM's when you were looking up Shadow Defender, but the huge benefit of a true VM is the host OS is completely and utterly inaccessible from the guest OS. With all the Virtualisation options that come with PC's now, a VM can run almost as fast as a host OS. If some hole was discovered in XP that allowed you to compromise the entire OS, your host OS would remain completely unaffected.... All you would lose is the guest OS, and anything you might have done within that environment. The alternative (Which is becoming more common) is the offline workstation running 95, 98 and XP.... these appear to be primarily games machines though.

It's up to you, I personally think continuing to use XP on a daily basis is playing with fire, but there we go.

AndyPix

2 great posts there Stoke - kudos for having the patience to explain it like that ..

Stoke wrote: »

coding flaws that still exist within Windows XP and that can be exploited. These are now not being patched

^^ This right here is the crux of the matter


Respect
Andy