There are some security peeps in my customer's organization that are looking for malware. They identified some of the programs I was running as suspicious. Here is their reasoning. Nobody else is running programs with the same names as the ones I run. What?They must be auditing the name of all programs runs by everyone. Then they see which ones are unique to certain individuals. They conclude that there must be something fishy with these apps. Duh. I am a developer. I write and name my own tools.
I tried to explain this to my management and to the customer. They said they would look into it. In the mean time, I am supposed to not run these programs. Hello? I need them to do my job. What is a coder supposed to do?
I figured I could name the programs "winword.exe", or something like that. However that would be a subversive act. It might just get me past the keystone cops. Anyone else with any sense would be able to figure out that I am impersonating Microsoft Word. That might be an even more egregious offense. For now I am rewriting my crucial tools in Java. That way when they look at the name of the program I am running, all they see is "java.exe". Noobs.
