No, if you embedded malicious code (say a full blown RAT, like this tool gives you) into an exe, modern av models will do static analysis of that code and flag it as potentially malicious. Because none of the JavaScript code in this backdoored electron app is even looked at by any engine(none of the engines on virustotal do analysis of JavaScript) the binary features are indistinguishable from the legitimate version.
True, but those are backdoored apps whose signatures has been identified and stored in some AV database. The solution is (provably) impossible to generalize with static analysis. Clearly, it's also reactive (people need to report the backdoored application before you know its signature). There are also fairly well-documented ways to get around this signature-approach to AV (polymorphism comes to mind).
No, signatures have nothing to do with this. The ml models embedded in those products (and what is evaluated on Virustotal) can flag legit software that has had a RAT executable inserted in it by modifying the binary. The ml models are trained on thousands of features, and are pretty good at classifying malware. USCYBERCOM has been tweeting APT malware that was not seen by these models or anyone in the public, and yet was still flagged. https://twitter.com/CNMF_VirusAlert . That would be completely impossible if these products were relying on signatures. Regardless, the entire point I was making in my original comment is that this article is far from clickbait nonsense, because you have a chance, significant from what I've seen, of flagging something like the backdoored pieces of software I linked or never before seen malware like in the tweets above because the malware exists as compiled code. JavaScript is currently not evaluated whatsoever by ANY software security product, so the chances of it being flagged and blocked is 0. Signatures and polymorphism are 10 years ago quite frankly. Backdoored Slack exfilling data in steganographic images over https to giphy.com and instagram and twitter and shit is one future realm of malware. Both the binary and the network traffic are completely indistinguishable from legitimate usage.
