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Symantec Hopes To Deliver Anti-Virus Online
daria42 writes "Symantec today said it will slowly move towards supplying its consumer applications online as services." From the article: "Sykes also said there was the possibility that tiny pieces of an application or a single virus scan could be resold by organisations such as online banks, which may choose to ensure their customers are not infected with a virus or spyware before they log on to their account ... This could be paid for by the customer using their credit card or by adding it to their mobile phone bill by sending a text message, said Sykes, who warned that banks could decide not to provide access to anyone with an infected computer."
What happens when a virus or spyware cripples your ability to launch the service via the web? What happens when you want to boot into a safe, standalone environment (no web access) and scan?
Every time I see a pop-up advertisement that says:
"YOUR COMPUTER COULD BE INFECTED WITH SPYWARE - CLICK HERE"
It sends up huge red flags for me, and I always shut them down without clicking. I've seen so many of them (wanting to optimize my Windows, etc.) that I'm now gun shy of any such remote scanning application.
I'll be thinking long and hard about letting anything scan my system through my firewall.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
This model for killing viruses sounds very much like the code gamers are getting used to seeing.
Its down to trust.
Before you can come on MY website, you have to run MY code. If you run my code and it gives the wrong result, then your fucked.
Problems, OS dependence, other people have mentioned already, but another is security - what kind of permissions do I have to give to allow arbitary code to be run which can access the running list of applications and OS internals, how do I know the code being run is safe?
Would you really feel safe opening up so much of your machine for a general internet site?
We are moving away from internet explorer and the nightmare of activeX, lets not go back to it.
After thought, if the banks implimented this as a standalone application and it did this scan as part of its initial authentication (like the gaming world), I would be less bothered than expecting this kind of code to be run in a browser. strange isn't it.
liqbase