Microsoft's Free AV App May Be a Non-Starter

CWmike writes "Microsoft is preparing to launch a public beta of Morro, the free anti-malware it announced last November, according to reports. Morro will use the same scanning engine as Windows Live OneCare, the software that the free software will replace and Microsoft's first consumer-grade antivirus package. OneCare is to get the boot as of June 30 (along with finance app Microsoft Money). John Pescatore, an analyst at Gartner, has questioned whether users would step up to Morro even if it was free. 'Consumers are hesitant to pay for a Microsoft security product that will remove problems in other Microsoft products,' he said. 'Think of it this way. What if you smelled a rotten egg odor in your water and the water company said, "Sure, we can remove that, but it will cost you $50." Would you buy it?' Not surprisingly, competitors have dismissed Morro's threat to their business. 'We like our chances,' Todd Gebhart, vice president in charge of McAfee's consumer line, said when it was announced OneCare was a goner. 'Consumers have already rejected OneCare,' added Rowan Trollope, senior vice president of consumer software at Symantec. 'Making that same substandard security technology free won't change that equation.'"

Comments

As long as..

[NervousNerd]

As long as it doesn't suck as much as Norton (slow, hard to remove), I'll take a look at it. Right now I'm running ClamWin, and I'm looking for a better (free) anti-virus.

Re:As long as..

[ShieldW0lf]

Motive: They're trying to seize control of their botnet back from the Chinese.

Re:As long as..

[PhracturedBlue]

According to a-v comparatives:
http://www.av-comparatives.org/comparativesreviews/corporate-reviews

Microsoft's AV software is very good. It has low false-positives and generally scored quite well. If the same capability is free, I don't see a reason not to recommend its use. I certainly don't work for a-v comparatives, but they were around before Microsoft was in AV business, and their top rated software changes pretty freqeuntly. I'd call them reasonably unbiased, but judge for yourself.

Re:As long as..

[Zxarr]

Avast Antivirus is pretty good too. It's free, but you need to register yearly.

Re:As long as..

[Opportunist]

Well, to give Norton some credit, they've been working on their removal procedure and it's now easier to remove.

So (since my boss once said "if you can't say anything good about your competitor, say nothing"), I can now not only say "Norton has a good looking box", I can also say "It's fairly easy to remove it".

Am I missing something?

[Raindance]

I'm not the biggest Microsoft fan out there, but this summary feels a little over the top.

'We like our chances,' Todd Gebhart, vice president in charge of McAfee's consumer line, said when it was announced OneCare was a goner. 'Consumers have already rejected OneCare,' added Rowan Trollope, senior vice president of consumer software at Symantec. 'Making that same substandard security technology free won't change that equation.'"

How can you say that with a straight face? The difference between for-pay and free is huge. And rebranding can make a big difference-- look at the recent success of Bing, for instance.

Personally, I think people are aching for alternatives to the current big players like McAfee. I'm reminded of this recent slashdot story-

"'Security firms Symantec and McAfee have both agreed to pay $375,000 to US authorities after they automatically renewed consumers' subscriptions without their consent.' The two companies were reported to the New York Attorney General after people complained that their credit cards were being charged without their consent. The investigators found that information about the auto-renewals was hidden at the bottom of long web pages or buried in the EULA."

I think something that's free and easy to use can compete very well against this sort of customer abuse.

p.s. anyone else find the quotation by John Pescatore completely unintelligible? Either he's very confused with his analogies or was misquoted.

Re:Am I missing something?

[houstonbofh]

It gets confusing when Norton and McAffe are the evil entrenched duopoly, and Microsoft is the plucky young upstart. Reminds me of the early 80s.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Deathlizard]

what bothers me most about this article is this line

'Consumers are hesitant to pay for a Microsoft security product that will remove problems in other Microsoft products,'

At this point, most malware doesn't hack Windows, it hacks your brain. It tricks you into executing it. The only vector that is even being used extensively anymore is Office, Acrobat, and Flash, MS has been phasing out older formats and patching up the holes and Adobe is finally waking up and doing something about their security issues. even in those programs, most of the time a Trojan file is involved.

On top of that, the most recent malware doesn't even need administrative privlages. It simply installs in your user account directory and starts up when you login. I see absoletly no reason why this method of execution wouldn't work in any other OS, Be it Linux, OSX, or BSD regardless of security settings.

Re:Am I missing something?

[aj50]

A huge advert window opens, minimising the fullscreen game that I'm playing to tell me to buy their product.

This must be some use of the word "non-intrusive" which I am not aware of.

Admittedly, I didn't have any problems with it as an anti-virus package, it was much better than bloated "full protection" software packages from Symantec and McAfee but I feel it's cheating somewhat to advertise your product as "free anti-virus" and then use it as a platform to advertise the pay-for versions which just have more features that I don't want.

Re:Am I missing something?

[donatzsky]

Try one of these:
http://www.wikihow.com/Remove-the-Popup-Ads-in-Avira-Antivir
http://www.tipsfor.us/2007/08/15/make-avira-antivir-free-edition-more-usable/

You gotta love it

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Microsoft, the virtual inventor of buggy bananaware and OS monoculture that enables mass distributable malware gets into the A/V market. Sounds like Typhoid Mary selling antibiotics...

Bad Analogy

[Colonel Korn]

'Think of it this way. What if you smelled a rotten egg odor in your water and the water company said, "Sure, we can remove that, but it will cost you $50." Would you buy it?'

This analogy is just dumb. This is a free product. Obviously the analogy would have the water company saying, "Sure, we can remove that for free."

Not to mention 'Consumers are hesitant to pay for a Microsoft security product that will remove problems in other Microsoft products,' which is a stupid point to make about a free product.

Furthermore, MS's security "problems" are over a billion installs. As we see every year when they tie Linux as the most secure system in pwn2own, they've got nothing to be upset about on the technical side of things.

And finally, "added Rowan Trollope, senior vice president of consumer software at Symantec. 'Making that same substandard security technology free won't change that equation'" is pretty funny from a guy representing a company that actually charges for substandard security technology.

Missing some info from the summary

[sqlrob]

I'm surprised a quote from this article didn't make it in:

Morro will work by routing all of a users Internet traffic to a Microsoft datacenter, where the Morro application will process the traffic and identify and block malware in real-time, by examining all of the rerouted traffic

How many people want all of their traffic explicitly going through Microsoft?

Re:Missing some info from the summary

[drooling-dog]

How many people want all of their traffic explicitly going through Microsoft?

On the other hand, it might be an effective way to protect users from the likes of Linux, Firefox, etc...

Bad analogy

[recoiledsnake]

'Think of it this way. What if you smelled a rotten egg odor in your water and the water company said, "Sure, we can remove that, but it will cost you $50."

I think that analogy is broken. Very few malware use the holes in MS software these days. Most of the viruses spread by user error, email, IM, flaws in Flash/Acrobat etc. MS is offering a service to clean them up and does provide free fixes for bugs in their software. Obligatory car analogy, car company sells insurance for breakins and accidents and charges extra. Why not pay for it if the deal is good?

Microsoft's disjointed AntiVirus strategy

[Gary W. Longsine]

Microsoft has, for years, maintained three separate tools in this space (that I know of, there might be others). They change the names of them periodically, to confuse their hapless victims.

Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool
You gotta read this page. They release a new version every month. It apparently cannot remove viruses which are not actively running. Why is this tool not built in to Microsoft Windows Defender?

Windows Live One Care
This link shows a forum moderator, chastising a poor infested user for asking a question about a different Microsoft antivirus product -- Microsoft Windows Defender. Why are these separate products, again?

Microsoft Windows Defender
Formerly known as Microsoft AntiSpyware.

These should be one product. The fact that Microsoft maintains three separate products to deal with this problem is, itself, an indication of a very serious ongoing problem at Microsoft. As a company, they still don't take this seriously.

Re:Microsoft's disjointed AntiVirus strategy

[DragonWriter]

Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool

Whenever I see that name, my mind initially takes it as a Software Removal Tool that is Malicious rather than a tool for removing malicious software.

Re:Microsoft's disjointed AntiVirus strategy

[Z34107]

The "Malicious Software Removal Tool" is pushed through Windows Update. It's not meant to be a full-blown virus scanner, just an install script that will neuter a few of this month's viruses. It's created for the computer illiterates with no virus scanner in the hopes that they left Automatic Updates on.

Windows Defender was supposed to be a very basic, lightweight application to provide some warning that you're infected It's part of Windows Vista, installable on Windows XP, and has some nifty functions that fall between msconfig and HijackThis. I can't speak to it's detection rate, but our help desk has gotten a few calls from people who didn't realize they were infected until Windows Defender told them so.

Windows Live OneCare was their attempt at competing with Symantec or Network Associates. They bought the basic engine from some other company, saw that the entire thing was written in VB 6, facepalmed, and rewrote it as OneCare. It also helps with remote backups and whatnot.

They really shouldn't be all one product, as they serve completely different purposes. Although if they made Windows Defender a bit more powerful, they'd have an uninstallable version of Live Care.