Fret not, Linux fans, Microsoft's Project Freta is here to peer deep into your memory... to spot malware Boffins in Microsoft Research has pulled the covers off Project Freta, a free service aimed at spotting memory malfeasance. A technology demonstration named for the street in Warsaw, Poland where Marie Curie was born, Freta comes from the NExT Security Ventures (NSV) team and is all about taking a VM snapshot and scanning the …
Hmm, if this is the Microsoft that I know, they will only really be using this technology to sniff out signs of piracy such as signatures of known cracks.
Just like Windows Defender is an anti-piracy tool. I don't even think they will bother disguising it as an anti-malware tool in the future releases.
If you run a large public VM farm -- and Microsoft does -- then identifying VMs with malware is important in stopping the VM farm from becoming the DDoS agent from hell. This isn't the only way to address the issue, but no technique has 100% coverage, so I can understand why they're building this method. It has some advantages too, such as not generating data which needs real-time analysis (unlike, say, intrusion detection systems).
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