Re: OfficeScan; additional observation

[bgreenbaum () SECURITYFOCUS COM (Ben Greenbaum)]

While doing some testing on the recently-revealed OfficeScan problems, I
noticed one other, unrelated thing: The installation process of OfficeScan
(even the trial version) completely uninstalls other vendor's AV
solutions. This was seen with both Norton and NAI/McAfee products. There
is no part of the process that asks if you want this to be done, no
warning prompt, just a window that says "Uninstalling (X)" and a progress
bar.

While it is a known fact that different AV products often don't play nice
together on the same system, it seems that better ways around this could
have been used. For example an alert box telling the user to uninstall or
disable other AV products, or a prompt asking the user for permission
before blowing other paid-for software away would be more reasonable.

My 2 cents,

Ben Greenbaum
Director of Site Content
Security Focus
http://www.securityfocus.com