Tech Preview

OLLI_S

@thebox So is your problem solved now?

thebox

@olli_s Yes, I managed to get it working using chrome first, however this is likely to be an issue with other firefox users.

Tom

A lot of work has been done in the last month.

Most of this work has been on things that are not immediately visible. Most has been on creating new rules, improving the rule matching engine (to ensure that we can deal with 32/64bit app bundles, app components like Java, compress utilities, etc. and bundled apps like Office) and on our internal tool to create and edit the rules.

This work should complete by next week, so we can start building "second" generation rules for improved detection of these "complicated" apps.

We have opened a new category in the forum Detection issues and Suggestions please suggest any missing apps and feel free to report any errors you spot. There is a post with some guidelines about what information would aide us creating correct rules.

We have also added detection of a few games and will potentially also add detection of drivers. This is purely a test and not something we are certain will continue, but everything depends on your feedback.

Initially there was some issues with the first versions of the agent, a few of you have not yet upgraded, I strongly recommend upgrading, to get continuous inspection results. The latest version seems to be stable for all who upgraded.

Tom

Today we are rolling out some breaking changes to the database and back end. This will cause some downtime. We do not expect any loss of data, however, some inspections may be postponed until tomorrow, because the back end is unavailable for a while.

OLLI_S

Does this also need a new local client?

Tom

@olli_s No new client is needed. Everything got rolled out without issues and without noteworthy downtime.

OLLI_S

@tom said in Tech Preview:

Today we are rolling out some breaking changes to the database and back end

And what changes should be visible?
I see no changes in the list of applications

Tom

@olli_s True. There is no visible changes. This was solely some internal things regarding the processing of inspection data and results, but from a technical point of view, they were significant. However, it allows us to build better rules. So going forward this is a significant improvement. We also improved the performance of the processing.

OLLI_S

Sounds cool

Tom

@olli_s What you may start to see is more entries for programs that come with both 32 and 64bit files. Currently, these will be duplicates in the UI, but later they will be "grouped", so only when you decide to expand e.g. CCleaner, will you learn that we detect both ccleaner.exe and ccleaner64.exe
So it is "just" another step in improving the detection.

OLLI_S

Cool, I am keen on the "Group" feature.

Tom

Three months have passed and we have received a lot of awesome feedback on this forum and directly via email.

This has kept our developers very busy during the hot summer, and their pipeline is still overflowing.

We had intended to make more frequent releases with smaller changes. However, based on our learnings, we decided to make some fundamentally incompatible changes to the rules, the matching engine and the UI.

We also decided that we needed a new name. Despite our intentions of sharing good CARMA

In short:
Next week we start the deployment of the "new product".

First we will be making changes to the rules and the matching engine. So you should expect to see unexpected results

Once these changes manifest, we will be releasing an early alpha version of the new product. Don't be too disappointed, there will not be many visual changes, in the beginning, except the name change - sorry

Shortly after releasing the early alpha version of the new product we will discontinue the SecTeer Personal CARMA. This means that you will need to uninstall Personal CARMA and install the new product.

Coincidentally the new product will be named: VulnDetect

Again thank you very much to everyone who in anyway has contributed to Personal CARMA, now VulnDetect.

I would like to make it clear, that we are (still) firmly committed to providing a free version of VulnDetect for personal use.

OLLI_S

@Tom You are on a good way to create a fantastic product.
The advantage in comparison with your competitors is that your updates are verified and if VulnDetect reports an update then we can trust on this information.

Tom

Please see this announcement about the Alpha:
https://vulndetect.org/topic/391/secteer-personal-vulndetect-alpha-launched-today