Microsoft Patents 'Proactive' Virus Protection

An anonymous reader writes "InfoWeek blogger Alex Wolfe wonders whether Microsoft will go after McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro, and Kaspersky for software royalties for proactive virus protection software. The technique enables security software to protect a PC against malware which isn't yet in the antivirus definition file, by comparing whether the new malware is similar to an old virus. Wolfe reports that Microsoft has been awarded U.S. patent 7,376,970 for "System and method for proactive computer virus protection," but that McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro, and Kaspersky have all been selling products implementing proactive virus protection for years before Microsoft even filed for the patent. Writes Wolfe: "One often wonders about software patents. I sure wonder about this one. I also wonder whether McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro, and Kaspersky are also going to be hearing from their friends in Redmond real soon"."

Comments

Re:Might not be a totally bad patent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, antivirus software already uses a sandbox technique exactly as described. That's one reason software takes longer to load with A/V software; first, it runs the executable in the "virtual machine" (sandbox). If it checks out, it runs normally. This is ancient in terms of technology, and not novel.

For some historically REALY old Prior Art

[DrYak]

There a nice page about the history of ThunderByte AntiVirus (TBAV), which pioneered heuristic detection of polymorphic viruses, at a time when most of the other Antivirus were purely signature based (well. mostly. there also have been antivirus using regular expressions as signature, in order to handle some degree of polymorphism).

This specific antivirus was started in 1988, more than 15 years before Microsoft submited its patent (2004).
I think here microsoft broke a new world record.