Security Companies Tussle With MS Security Center

hey0you0guy writes, "The large security firms such as Symantec and McAfee want Microsoft to allow them to replace Microsoft's Windows Security Center. Microsoft is refusing these requests. 'By imposing the Windows Security Center on all Windows users, Microsoft is defining a template through which everybody looks at security,' Bruce McCorkendale, a chief engineer at Symantec, said in an interview. 'How do we trust that Microsoft knows what all the important things about security are to warn users about?' Given Microsoft's past, with vast piles of security flaws and patches, they should at least cooperate with these companies. A dispute still exists over PatchGuard, a security feature that Microsoft says is designed to guard core parts of the 64-bit version of Vista, but which critics say locks out helpful software from security rivals."

Comments

Re:Arrrrr!

[dave562]

What's the harm in running both at the same time?

Have you ever run two anti-virus programs on a computer at the same time? More often than not your file system performance completely tanks because every time a file is accessed you have two programs trying to scan it and verify it's integrity. You will also frequently run into problems where one AV program will label the other AV program as a virus.

Simple solution

[ditoa]

Don't replace, disable! Simply disable the Security Centre service, install your own and you're done. Infact this is exactly what we have done at work, the idea of a security centre is great however we wanted to add our own applications to the security centre. Sadly there is no way to do this with the default security centre in Windows XP SP2. So rather than try and extend it we simply disabled it and replaced it. Doing the job of the security centre is pretty simple as it is documented what applications have to do to be "seen" by the security centre so we just did the opposite to monitor them (Symantec is very difficult about this because it has anti-monitoring tech built in). I don't see why this is a big problem for Symantec. AFAIK there is no reason they cannot disable the security centre service when they install their application.