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I always thought protecting users from malicious code they willingly download and run themselves is futile and a waste of developers' resources. Do I miss some

• akerl_ 9y ago
  It's one of the few non-futile uses of developer resources, when it comes to security. It's a virtual certainty that users will download malicious code, so as a security person you're left trying to mitigate the impact when they do.
• callumjones 9y ago
  Given malicious code is hidden in applications that appear to be safe or appealing to users I don’t think they are usually willingly downloading malicious code.
• pfg 9y ago
  It's not going to do much for targeted attacks, but there are definitely ways to limit the damage for large-scale ransomware attacks. As it is right now, ransomware doesn't even need to bother with privilege escalation because files valuable to users are most likely owned by them. Not to say that all ransomware malware sticks to just user privileges, but it's usually enough do get the job done. Having a sort of firewall for file systems that's enforced by the system means that in addition to getting code to run with user privileges, the malware authors need to trick the victims into giving the software root (which might be impossible on enterprise networks), or use a privilege escalation vulnerability to do that. Of course, people could still click through prompts, allow access to all apps due to warning fatigue, etc., but it's an improvement - if done correctly.