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Microsoft Acquires Spyware Removal Company
ack154 writes "Checking for updates on my new favorite spyware removal company, I found that Microsoft has acquired Giant AntiSpyware as of 12/16. I must say that it is very refreshing to see Microsoft finally start to take some serious action to help combat this rampant problem. According to the Giant site, a beta version is expected within one month for Microsoft customers (running Windows 2000 and later, of course)."
On the upside, if they are serious about it, I think this is going to be a huge boon for corporate IT. Spyware has become one of the biggest headaches for IT these days. I believe about 50% of our support tickets are related to spyware.
Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/
Isnt this a conflict of interest making the software that has the bugs and also selling the software that covers over those bugs. (I know Microsoft...)
I think this really shows how Micky Mouse the code is that they are taking this route instead of getting the protocols right from the start.
The first post after the spoofing vulnerabilitiy in IE is MSFT buying their way out of their own self-created problems...
If created, would this Microsoft anit-spyware tool remove all of the spyware and adware that comes pre-loaded with Windows? A friend of mine ran Spybot S&D on a clean, out-of-the-box Windows machine, and SpyBot picked up several insatnces of propreitary malware before the machine even hooked up to the web... And if this tool doesn't remove all of the aforementiond preloaded spyware, how can it possbily be effective at removing the non-Microsoft versions accquired over the course of normal Internet travel? I go to MSN Groups and SpyBot tells me it has blocked the download of Adware Inc... Just my thoughts on this as it develops.
Ya know, as soon as they release a Microsoft branded spyware removal tool will be the day they draw the line in the sand defining exactly what apps are welcome on the Microsoft platform and what apps are not. If Microsoft gets the final say of what runs on your machine, what makes you think they're only going to be removing spyware?
How we know is more important than what we know.
So Microsoft is finally admitting that they need external help to deal with the runaway train that they call security?
Just to play devil's advocate -- is there any chance that MS has purchased GIANT in an attempt to quell the complaints of spyware that come from MS users?
What if Microsoft purchased GIANT just to assuage users through the use of a Spyware removal tool that said: "You are okay now! (Congratulations!)".
MS is still the borg. They are losing considerable market share to Mozilla based browers at this point and they need to fight back with their typical FUD -- even if it means buying anti-spyware companies.
Why not just create a browser that is not as heavily infected with spyware vulnerabilities?
I will take my software GPL'd please. Thanks for coming out!
Don't be silly. From a profit taking point of view, why on earth would they want to fix the problem, when it's the potential source of extra revenue?
From MS's point of view, their large marketshare combined with a demand for security fixes has actually *created* demand for more things they can sell, rather than harming their business. With no real competitors in their space, they have the luxury of taking their time fixing things. There is no percieved alternative so they're not driven to compete with anyone in the security space.
You know, it could be that MS purchased Giant so they don't have to do their own research into the intricacies of how some spyware is installed, avoids detection, and re-inserts itself after "removal". Sometimes an hour with the book beats a week in the lab. If they'd only hired the expertise (who probably currently work for A/V companies), they might have been sued for IP theft.
No man's an island, unless he's had too much to drink and wets the bed.
Performing workarounds for Windows is what leads to acceptance of viruses (just buy an antivirus) and what leads to acceptance of spyware (just buy an antispyware) and what leads to acceptance of systems so bogged down by combinations of the above (just reinstall every 6 months).
It's a bit like living in a really bad neighbourhood and denying it's a problem. "Oh we're OK, we live in a safe area. As long as you put bars on all your windows, don't leave the house when it's dark, put up bullet proof windows, and don't make eye contact with the neighbours you're perfectly safe"
Apart from how it's broken, it works perfectly.
MS is fucked, but they don't mind. The consumer state of society today means MS can just tell people they need to buy something, and people will do what they're told to.
What makes you think they're going to charge for it? Microsoft has taken a hit on OS utilities before. They spent millions developing IE, which they then gave away. IIS is included with Windows for free. Tools like SFU can be downloaded for free. They included a disk defragmenter in W2K and newer. My guess is they'll include it in the next release of the OS, or maybe next XP service pack.
I've just recently started Giant's AntiSpyware program and found it to be excellent at cleaning up the VX2 remanents and anything else left over after running Spybot S&D and Lavasoft's Ad-Aware. I sure hope that M$'s take-over doesn't make a worth-while antispyware tool worthless.
I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or Mepis or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.
If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.
To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this post out. This is an article about email disclaimers. The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx, because "is teh free".
Here's another. In this post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.
Here's that drive-by advocacy and FUD in motion: twitter goes on about some topic and then drops the usual "oh and M$ is teh evil" because "WMP phones home" or some such. Called on his FUD, he then claims that WMP stores every song and movie you've ever played in a file, somewhere. Pressed further, he just sort of slithers out of sight, his FUD-spreading complete. This is not about some Microsoft technology that nobody likes anyway; it's about lying for the sake of lying. Way too many of his posts are exactly like this one.
More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or these two. Or this one. Or this one.
Still not convinced? This is what twitter considers "humour" while going about his daily "M$" routine.
M
Don't be silly. From a profit taking point of view, why on earth would they want to fix the problem, when it's the potential source of extra revenue?
You just described the 'give the software away for free, make your money providing support' business plan, as championed by some of the Open Source advocates.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
Microsoft makes money based on upgrades. New versions of Windows, new versions of Office, new versions of whatever. People blindly upgrade in the hopes that the new version will fix the bugs of the old one. But all these new versions are just as buggy as the first. Not the same bugs, but all new ones...
Now if Microsoft were to make a product that performed wonderfully the first time around, why would you have any incentive to upgrade? They can tout new features and bells and whistles, but if the product you have is working fine for you, then why spend the money?
As long as they hold a monopoly, they can continue to create buggy software with no real risk of losing customers.
Now what if they could sweeten the deal even more. What if they "forced" people to buy software that had a giant problem, and they also sold the cure. Then they get to charge you twice. They could fix the problem, but then they would lose money. That doesn't make much sense. As long as there are no real alternatives to the average user, Microsoft has free reign to run their stratagy.
Microsoft isn't dumb. There's a reason they are where they are today. They've found a damn good buisness stratagy that works.
Actually I have come up with an almost perfect solution for most people. I have a pair of scripts that use the Microsoft command line ACL tool from the 2000 server resource kit. The first one sets the downloaded program files directory to read only for everyone, and the other sets it to read for everyone and full controll for the person running the script (they obviously must have permissions on the parent container in order to be able to change the ACL's on the downloaded program files directory). Basically you normally run with read only permissions and only change to full permission to allow trusted ActiveX controlls to install. This gets you most of the protection of disabling ActiveX without breaking things like the Adobe Reader plugin. I expect Microsoft might include something like this in the next major revision of IE, there is precidense with the run as restricted user feature in XP.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
What I always thought was interesting was the RAV guys were very pro-Linux and sunk a lot of money into AV for Linux. The next day when every heard this (After advertising it Ad Nauseum in Linux Journal), M$ bought them out almost immediately. I was always suspicious that RAV was a "prime buy-out material" just for that reason.
As always, add your own conspiracy theory below by clicking on the [reply to this] button.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
This is exactly the point I've been trying to make within our corporation for the last year. Relatively unsuccessfully, I might add.
Naturally, our office, which I admin and which has about 100 PC users, is almost completely a Firefox shop. Malware was a serious problem when I arrived, and after implementing a centralized antivirus setup and switching everyone to Firefox, support calls have dwindled to nearly nothing, and the few calls I have gotten were those few sneaky users who thought that they could get away with using IE behind my back.
I was in a corporation-wide IT meeting last month, and I brought up using Firefox. Apparently the help desks for other offices are totally swamped. So the head IT guy asks me if switching has affected malware infection rate, so I told him the same thing I mentioned above. The room was totally silent; these guys were shocked. The meeting ended with a decision to start "testing" Firefox, but a few people were outright hostile to the idea at all. As far as I'm aware, they still haven't even given the "testing" idea a second thought, even though their malware problem continues to grow.
But the big thing stopping us from going to Firefox completely is our damn intranet apps. We've poured millions into these half-assed ActiveX programs that require IE. I mean, WTF? Why on Earth would you write a web-based application that requires a specific OS (Windows), a specific browser (IE), and a specific processor (i386)? It's madness! Sure, you could argue that application updates can still be done centrally, but even this they've fucked up-- every time an update comes out, we have to remove the program manually from "C:\windows\downloaded program files". Talk about living in the dark ages!
Anyhow... I'm guessing that this is the big reason why Microsoft doesn't just axe the whole ActiveX thing-- this would be a nightmare for many an IT manager. Not to mention-- look at where ActiveX came from: it started as OLE, became COM, and is now becoming .NET. MS has dumped tons of cash into a flawed piece of software, and thousands of programmers know how to write software for it.
I don't know about you but on my SP2 box activeX controls are stopped at the door unless I click the yellow bar. Now there may be ways around that but I have not seen any spyware on my machine since I installed sp2.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
I do contract work for Microsoft through an unnamed company. I've been doing it for about a month and a half now, and I'm making more money than I ever have and I'm almost completely convinced that I should quit. I've got only this to say: NOTHING works there. The network is slower than dialup (I shit you not, slower than 56K dialup) and about 30% of the time even accessing an internal website on the LAN will return a network error. Their internal tools are more buggy and crash-prone than the software they sell. Their ultimate fixer for any problem? "Did you try rebooting?" Also, it takes like a week for a new user's permissions to propagate to all of the requisite domain controllers. A week. Flip some bits here, flip some bits there, wtf takes a week? Well, it is WINDOWS...
And their middle-management system is laughable. (this is why they need to charge so much for the software: middle managers who contribute nada) They take a simple, one-man project (like something you could easily solve with a Perl script), divide it amongst two TEAMS of people of 4+ people each, and then wonder why nothing gets done. Maybe it's because each person has such a small piece of the pie that you need to assemble both teams at the exact same time in order to accomplish anything and most everyone is too busy coming in late or leaving early or taking a long lunch or just not being in their office to come to those meetings.
So you're totally right: MS is fucked, but they don't mind.
You are wrong in so many ways.
.Net). Name one (for any platform) email client that will recognize an attachment as Java, locate the executable, and automate the execution of the untrusted code. Also, just for good measure, name one cross-platform virus (doesn't have to be email-borne) of ANY type.
Viruses are exclusive (almost) to Windows because it's possible for them to spread. Linux enforces user permissions so (unless you, stupidly, run as root) there's not too much havok the can wreck. Sure you may loose the stuff in your home directory (~) or other files you own, but that's not that big of a problem (most viruses try and damage systems, not files). Viruses also, traditionally speaking, make use of security holes, or other such things. If these don't exist then there's no real threat.
Antivirus software IS useless under Linux. There are no (to my knowelege) viruses for the platform, so there's nothing to detect. The only advantage I can see to there being scanning software is to clean up Windows partitions. As soon as the first Linux virus manifests then it will make sense to have it, but if there's nothing to detect then why have software to detect "it".
To touch on your cross-platform email virus. I don't know about you, but what mail clients do you know of that automatically run code from email attachments? Not only that, but they'd also have to recognize the format and call up the interpreter for that specific format. I know, for a fact, that none of the email clients I've ever used (at all... under any platform), save Outlook, DO execute untrusted code. Your version of a cross-platform virus would have to be built in either a scripting language (which can even be quite powerful. eg Python) or an interpreted language (eg Java or
Either you don't know enough about the subject matter or your logic is that "you never know... someone might be able to figure out how to code a virus for a system that's proven resistant." That's kind of like wearing a little white surgical mask all the time because "you never know... them terrorists might figure out how to dust my city with anthrax." Possibility does not equal probability.
Jeremy Logan's Website.
Many of Microsoft's security flaws are self imposed. ActiveX and security zones in IE, for example. Eager to make the web another Windows application zone, they introduced ActiveX. Wanting to crush Netscape because they could possibly make Microsoft Windows irrelavent in the future, they integrated IE into Windows, and that required security zones. I won't lay the blame entirely on Microsoft for the viruses and worms, but I will lay it on them for the drive-by install of spyware that every IE user has to beware of. In their efforts to destroy competition, they opened their customers up to this.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
I have to administer mac's at my college, and every one of them has anti spyware anti virus on them. Why would this be?
Shouldn't you be asking the administrator this question? Hang on....
Admittedly Linux machines dont have the infections yet but they are ones I've used online for a total of 15 minutes so not long enough to be infected.
Maybe you should have waited an hour or two before posting then.
Or you could just ask someone who's used Linux online for a little longer than you. They might be able to tell you how likely it is that you'll pick up an infestation of spyware (Hint: It's somewhere between Buckley's and none).
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
#2. There are far more options than
a. "riddled with spyware"
and
b. "100% bug free"
Linux is not "100% bug free" but its security model is far better than Microsoft's and, as a result, it is far less likely to be infected.I'm sure they do, for a suitable definition of "Knowledgeable".
Or, to put it another way, there are lots and Lots and LOTS of infected Windows machines out there so maybe the requirements to be considered "Knowledgeable" are a little too extreme?But there is a continuum there, not a binary state.
Sure, security might be a "problem", right below hard drive crashes and CPU fan failures.
The idea is to remove/reduce the potential threats so that your system is not cracked within 10 minutes of going online.That is correct. But there are LOTS of bullets available that Microsoft is ignoring.
The biggest is to change IE from an "allow everything except what is specifically denied" security model to one such as Firefox's "deny everything except what is specifically allowed".
Sure, a "knowledgeable user" could configure both systems to have the same, effective security, but as I've stated before, there doesn't seem to be a lot of those "knowledgeable" users around.
The second biggest thing is to TURN OFF UN-NECESSARY SERVICES. Look at a stock Win2000 or WinXP machine and see all the services that are on by default.Yep. But the least Microsoft can do is to make their system as secure as possible.
Cracking is all about access.
If the bad guys cannot get access to your system (no ports open), then they lose an entire avenue of attack.
The fact remains that getting rid of spyware is very, very hard.
/shameless plug ]
Agreed. However, installing spyware in the first place shouldn't be as ridiculously easy as it is!
The design tradeoffs between security/usability have in IE have created a wonderful inTRAnet explorer. It's great for filling in the company timesheet using some custom ActiveX applet, but it should _NEVER_ be allowed on the inTERnet.
To follow your analogy, a dune-buggy is fantastic at messing around on dunes, but you wouldn't want to be driving one on the highway.
[ shameless plug ]
See "Examination of PC security: How we got where we are and how to fix it"
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