I used to work on an anti malware team. There were two controversial issues that related to that work that I want to bring up here.
First, what is malware? It’s actually very hard to define in such a way that makes everyone happy. The line gets really blurry on the border of nuisance vs malicious, and on security tools, which might do things in the name of privacy that malicious software might do to hide its tracks.
The other issue is false positives. We tried really hard to avoid false positives; we ran tests with known good binaries to see if they were inappropriately detected, etc. We feared false positives more than false negatives.
I am sure that the MS antimalware team is having a bad day and not acting in bad faith.
First, what is malware? It’s actually very hard to define in such a way that makes everyone happy. The line gets really blurry on the border of nuisance vs malicious, and on security tools, which might do things in the name of privacy that malicious software might do to hide its tracks.
The other issue is false positives. We tried really hard to avoid false positives; we ran tests with known good binaries to see if they were inappropriately detected, etc. We feared false positives more than false negatives.
I am sure that the MS antimalware team is having a bad day and not acting in bad faith.