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Microsoft's Vista AV Fails Certification
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Feb 06, 2007 10:43 PM
from the black-eye dept.
from the black-eye dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's much-hyped anti-virus solution, Live OneCare and three other Vista AV products failed to achieve the Virus Bulletin's VB100 certification. The other products are McAfee's VirusScan Enterprise, G DATA's AntiVirusKit 2007, and Norman's VirusControl. All failed to pass a series of tests that are required to display the VB100 badge. 'With the number of delays that we've seen in Vista's release, there's no excuse for security vendors not to have got their products right by now,' said John Hawes, technical consultant at Virus Bulletin."
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Microsoft's Vista AV Fails Certification
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excuses... (Score:5, Interesting)
That would be a good excuse for most security vendors...
Re:excuses... (Score:5, Informative)
That's how companies like Kaspersky and AVG came out with fully Vista compliant versions of their software months ago. Software which works extremely well, by the way. (Kaspersky passed this test. It says so right in the article.)
Hello Symantec... (Score:1, Flamebait)
(http://mobileoptimized.com/)
Re:Hello Symantec... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure such a thing is even possible anymore. The usefulness of AV software has always been pretty questionable, and they never seem to have gotten over the threat model of months or years-old viruses being passed from floppy to floppy. Most threats are one-off now, like social engineering spam, one-day long trojan horse attacks, adware, and exploiting OS vulnerabilities to run spam zombies. As far as I can tell, my resource-hogging, system-destabilizing virus scanner does effectively nothing against any of those and there's no reason to believe it can be changed to do so.
Re:Hello Symantec... (Score:4, Insightful)
As far as I can tell, my resource-hogging, system-destabilizing virus scanner does effectively nothing against any of those and there's no reason to believe it can be changed to do so.
ABSOLUTELY. I gave up on AV programs some time ago. A good firewall, firewall-like execution protection such as Process Guard, not using the most popular email programs or web browsers, and severely restricting web-based application execution (i.e., boycott ActiveX and hamstring Java and Javascript) are far more effective techniques for tripping up a virus as such attacks will almost always try to 1) exploit networking applications most common to the OS, 2) try to run some kind of executable that you haven't run before, and/or 3) attempt some kind of network operation in order to propagate itself. Trying to recognize virus signatures is a lousy use of CPU resources, and has not been seen to be very effective.
AV software companies are addicted to the subscription model that signature-based AV provides, and consequently are in a serious conflict-of-interest with regards to best security practices. Symantec in particular seems to be short of ideas for an alternative business model, and have opted instead to whine like a six-year-old who's mommy won't let them buy candy at the checkstand.
bad logic (Score:1, Flamebait)
I wonder how a Free anti-virus program would do (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe the ClamAV [clamav.net] people ought to submit their program for testing.
Re:I wonder how a Free anti-virus program would do (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.theroughnecks.net/)
A very good excuse... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.benhirsch.name/)
Re:A very good excuse... (Score:4, Funny)
Nothing to do with Vista (Score:5, Interesting)
If you read the entire article, you'll notice a little blurb at the end that several vendors passed the test, one of which was Kaspersky [kaspersky.com]. Another excellent vendor for Vista is AVG [grisoft.com].
Kaspersky consistantly beats [cybernetnews.com] all the other major anti-virus vendors, but I guess the story wouldn't be quite as Slashdot-worthy if it ready "Kaspersky Anti-Virus on Vista Works Great!".
Re:Nothing to do with Vista (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.weather.com/?prod=xoap&par=1001306527)
Re:Nothing to do with Vista (Score:5, Funny)
Hate to say it (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Tuesday July 03, @01:04AM)
Re:Hate to say it (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://pietersz.co.uk/ | Last Journal: Wednesday May 04 2005, @05:22AM)
If we talking about trashing the system instead of trashing ~, you would be right in the case of a single user system.
However, we are talking about trashing everything, against trashing just ~. Obviously just ~ is better.
In the case of a multi-user system, trashing one users ~ is much better than trashing everything. Most home PCs are multi users. Office PCs are invariably single user, but they should get backed up.
It is much easier to back up a single user's directory than an entire system.
Finally, limited access to the system makes it harder for viruses to propagate. How is it going to run again after a log out? Most people do not regularly run executables from their own directories: the executables they do run will not be infected. Certainly something like bash_profile or an autostart directory, but cleaning these up should be trivial. Am I missing anything here?
OH NO, NO VB100??!? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.securityzone.org/)
Great Sales Pitch (Score:3, Informative)
For obvious reasons I will leave it to the reader to decide if they want to go and have a look, no links will be provided.
Mark the article tile as FUD and sensationalism. (Score:1, Interesting)
Live OneCare, Mcafee are not specific Vista -- You can install them on XP too.
And 99.99% detection rate is nothing to be sneered at.
Remind me.... (Score:1, Troll)
Re:Remind me.... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.evanmorris.com/)
*What* VirusControl? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, if you're excuse me, I need to get back to setting up my Linkskey router...
Re:*What* VirusControl? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.fagerland.org/)
Thanks for playing, though!
Wait a minute (Score:1)
What Bill Thought (Score:2)
(http://www.stox.org/)
Bill: You mean make all our security programmers wear straight-jackets and prescribed large doses of anti-psychotic drugs.
Steve: I guess so.
Bill: OK, get right on it.
No excuse, like no excuse... (Score:5, Funny)
Security vendors. They're all alike. They say they come to help...to save us from all things dark, but in their black hearts, they all want the same thing. They all want to RULE the earth!
Better Solution (Score:2, Informative)
(http://www.murraynet.net/ | Last Journal: Monday August 20, @09:09PM)
This website has a great video I think all noobs should be required to watch BEFORE owning a computer.
http://www.my-pc-help.com/video/v10017.htm [my-pc-help.com]
An ounce of prevention is always better than the cure.
This is just one review... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.goretsky.com/)
I shared my thoughts on this over here [neowin.net] on Neowin.Net's forums, so I really don't just want to do a cut-and-paste job and post what I wrote in verbatim here.
This is one of the first of a series of comparisons to include Microsoft Windows Live OneCare that Virus Bulletin [virusbtn.com] Magazine has been doing for many years. While I suspect it is more frustrating than embarrassing at this point for the team responsible for Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare, this is really Microsoft's first attempt at providing their own comprehensive anti-malware solution—MSAV [wikipedia.org], the product which shipped with DOS does not count, it was licensed from Central Point Software (who was later acquired by Symantec) who, in turn, had licensed the software from Carmel Software—and it is going to take some time and lots of signature release cycles in order to get their detection rate fine-tuned.
I don't expect this first Virus Bulletin product comparison to be the last, and the question really isn't how Microsoft did this time: It is how their product does over the next year or two that matters. If it gets worse or stays the same, they are just another competitor in the space (albeit the one with the deepest products). If, however, their detection rate improves, it is going to make it just that much more difficult for their competitors to compete against them.
As a disclaimer of sorts, I should mention that happen I work for one of the computer security companies that Microsoft competes against with this products, so this dicussion is far from academic for me. Frankly, though, I'm not expecting Microsoft's entry into this space to have any effect on my employer—we are good at what we do and have a very loyal customer base. Also, we tend to compete against other, similarly-sized companies in the field. What I do worry about, though, is how some of my friends and colleagues at the largest companies are going to handle Microsoft's entrance as they are going to be competing head-to-head against Microsoft for marketshare.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Big whoop.. (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Tuesday September 18, @02:29AM)
Strange... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.ucla.edu/)
Microsoft's offering was one of four suites which failed to detect all malware. The others were G-Data AntiVirusKit 2007 v.17.0.6353, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.1i and Norman Virus Control 5.90.
See, I run McAfee VirusScan Enterprise on Desktops and Servers here without problems. The latest version in the 8.0 line is 8.0i patch 15 [mcafeehelp.com]. The Vista-compatible version is 8.5i [mcafeehelp.com] which also works on Windows XP. There is no version 8.1i that I know of. Obviously this doesn't change the message that McAfee didn't earn the seal but I've never had problems with the VirusScan Enterprise line. To be frank, I've never encountered a single infection or uncontrolled virus problem on our network.
Plus, who honestly uses just *one* virus scanner on the perimeter of their Microsoft Server-system based network? I certainly don't. For example, Exchange 2003 server on the perimeter runs software from GFI which has three separate virus scanning engines. This coupled with application executable hash-based protection offered in BlackICE takes care of the rest of the problems at the desktop/server level. It's the price we pay for using MS software.
Sensationalism at its finest (Score:1, Insightful)
Vista is irrelevant to this "award" (Score:1)
Terrible Tagging (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.tumbledry.org/)
Best AntiVirus Still.... (Score:1)
Whoever submitted this (Score:1, Funny)
New tag (Score:2, Funny)
...and here's the rest of the story! (Score:1, Informative)
(http://star-trek.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday September 20, @08:01AM)
Live OneCare caught 99.91% of the known viruses (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Thursday April 05 2007, @08:55AM)
F-Secure (Score:2)
(http://www.bluecrimson.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday August 05, @10:40AM)
I don't know how many times I had to do virus cleanup on an F-secure PC because it couldn't delete the file, or it would happily let the virus run in the background, or not detect it at all. and that if it's running, since it wouldn't run in safe mode and half the time get corrupted by the virus.
AVG (Score:2, Interesting)
Did I mention they have a free version? For 9x/XP/Vista AND Linux?
Yeah.
M$ not the only one with crappy virus protection (Score:2)
The major A/V vendor's all failed it . . . (Score:1)
There's just something wrong about a crewman who never smiles!
Re:microsoft (Score:2)
Re:microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
Re:microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, since Vista is securebydesign, it too no longer needs any anti-viruses!
Re:Umm.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:options... (Score:1)
Re:NAV (Score:2)
(http://www.musterion.net/)
Re:options... (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Tuesday September 18, @02:29AM)
However, they really should have a grace period of at least 6 months where they are still selling their computers with the option of Windows XP. After all, you can't guarantee everyone's business application will run on Vista, so untill thats sorted, businesses will still want to run XP, or 2000 for that matter.
Unfortunately, they don't really care about that point of view, what they do care is about selling as many machines with Vista on it. For the home user buying a new PC, it probably won't make much difference in the end.