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McAfee, Symantec Think Vista Unfair

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the get-in-line dept.

davidwr writes "Is Microsoft unfairly locking anti-virus companies out of Vista? Symantec and McAfee seem to think so and they aren't being very quiet about it, placing a full-page ad in the Financial Times. If you've found the ad online, please post a link."

4 of 424 comments (clear)

  1. Why is Trend-Micro different? by PoconoPCDoctor · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Trend Micro is the only (AFAIK) vendor that is certified to produce an anti-virus product for Vista. Are they being given the keys to the castle while McAfee and Symantec are left out in the cold?

    Anyone know why this is so? Do tell!

    --
    "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
  2. No love lost for both of them by Nanite · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Personally, I wouldn't care if both Mcafee and Symantec went bankrupt tomorrow. Both feature bloated, buggy software, and symantec's sales pressure to 'Upgrade' to newer buggier software rather than renewal of the old software is just disgusting. Granted, I don't know if MS could do a better job, given their abysmal track record on security and virus prevention. They love to just leave the barndoor open for stuff like that. But they may be able to produce a spyware/virus solutions that works better within their systems, better than the monkeys at Mcafee and Symantec anyways.

    --
    God is real unless declared integer.
  3. Re:McAfee, Symantec living on borrowed time by adamdrayer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There is nothing wrong with signature-based virus protection. It is very difficult to design systems that can pre-emptively determine good code from bad. Heuristics has a place in security, but its not as accurdate, IMHO, and contending with flase positives would be more annoying to home users than paying the nominal fee. For corporations, you have IDS/IPS systems, and they are trying to develop this for the desktop (Host-base IPS or HIPS), but confuring them properly can be extremely difficult, and allows for more user error, which can negative the entire effect.

    And striping drives won't help fight off malware, that's for redundancy and performance. And frequent ghosts aren't the answer either. I would recommend users backup data and not installations or partitions. You can be backing up an already corrupt/infected system.

    It amazes me how little people are willing to pay for their computer. Its easily a gigantic part of many people's lives, however, they'd rather spend more on their dishware and drapes than they would on the thing that they use to do just about everything including personal banking.

    Mcaffee and Symantec are important to the security industry, and help drive it. MS would be stupid to squeeze them out. Every computer should have a reputable company's security software installed or their ISP shouldn't allow them on the internet. Kinda like how cars need to be insured. The thing is, however, they should have the choice of what security company they trust.

  4. Re:No, that's not correct by Markusis · · Score: 4, Interesting


    I really hate this popular Slashdot myth that viruses only exist because OSes are designed improperly. No, wrong. ... There isn't an OS level defense for this short of an Orwellian trusted computing scheme. If I sent you a version of Apache with malicious code in it and you installed it as root, I could do whatever I wanted. Doesn't matter how secure your OS is, you gave it the permissions it needs.
    </snip>

    This is why SELinux and App Armor exist. With a proper SELinux or App Armor setup you could install Apache as root and all it will be allowed to do is what Apache does normally. So, it would only be allowed to read the /etc/httpd directory and the /var/www directory. It would only be able to write to the /var/log/httpd directory and listen on port 80 and 443. So, this could prevent an exploit in Apache from taking over the rest of your system.

    Admittedly this example wouldn't help a desktop user. But, there is no reason why SELinux or App Armor couldn't help a desktop user. One example would be if Firefox was locked down to only allow downloads to the ~/Downloads directory or something like that. Now any hole in firefox would only be able to damage your ~/Downloads directory and presumably your firefox cache directory or something. It wouldn't be able to delete ~/Pictures and ~/Music. The browser example is kind of complicated because it has so many tasks these days. But, the point is that you can prevent a lot of problems by employing some kind of mandatory access control system.

    Oh, and it really isn't that hard to use one of these systems either. Yeah, they can be pretty nasty if you really get into it (especially SELinux). But, for a desktop user there really isn't anything to worry about. I use Fedora Core 5 at work and at home and I've kept SELinux enabled on both systems. App Armor is really nice to use for the purposes of locking down a server system in this way. SELinux is more generic but it is much more complex than App Armor.