Full Disclosure mailing list archives
RE: MS Anti Virus?
From: "joe" <mvp () joeware net>
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 13:07:29 -0400
I think you believe MS is going into the AV market because it wants to. I don't think that is the case. In fact I think they would rather not be in that market. I take as evidenced the fact of going into that market once and then dropping out of it. I also recall hearing the rumors that the bought the AV company and started working on it because they wanted to give this AV away for free with SP2 and then realized that they would be back in court over it. I believe MS is doing this strictly as a means to protect itself and possibly help users at the same time. With luck as the OS features get better and better the reasons for AV should hopefully reduce (but again I doubt entirely dry up) thereby reducing the market that you think they are going into to make cash on. Since they will have to charge for it, I hope to see them do a small charge once up front, and then free updates for the time frame you have the OS loaded. A lot of folks lose their protection after the free update period expires with the third party stuff. Many, myself included aren't willing to pay monthly or yearly fees to AV companies.
since M$ products account for a majority of the A/V infections
This is on par with saying most cars crashed are from GM without stating the point that GM has the most cars on the road. You can say MS has the most inept users, most inept admins, most viruses, most bugs, most lots of things because they simply have the most period. I was chatting with some friends the other day and the conversation turned to the idea that had MS initially started with the implementation of fewest services running as possible on their machines, we wouldn't know about a great deal of the bugs/holes that were in there as they would still be buried. Why? Because there would be no point in attacking the service if only a small subset of people were running it. The bugs could sit in there and live forever until someone accidentally stumbled on one. You wouldn't be cool for finding a hole in say the messenger service if hardly anyone was running it, people would simply say big deal, the press wouldn't be reporting "Hole found in messenger service, thousands in danger of illicit penetration!". As an aside, I think we would also have less penetration of computers in general in the market place. Most people started using computers in the home because they were easy to use and MS made it that way. -----Original Message----- From: full-disclosure-admin () lists netsys com [mailto:full-disclosure-admin () lists netsys com] On Behalf Of Gregory A. Gilliss Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2004 2:03 PM To: full-disclosure () lists netsys com Subject: Re: [Full-disclosure] MS Anti Virus? Dan et al: You are missing the point here. While it matters little *who* is in the A/V market, it matters very much when one player is Microsoft, because the M$ business model (according to them and to the US DOJ) is to enter a market, undercut the market, co-opt the market, drive out the competition, and move on to the next market (not unlike a virus, as told by Agent Smith). So if M$ enters the A/V market and "bundles" their solution with Windows whatever, they likely will drive Symantec and McAfee out of the market over time by co-opting the A/V subscription market. The security ramifications of a M$ only A/V marketplace relate to Dan Geer's monoculture argument (already well discussed here) and also a conflict of interest (since M$ products account for a majority of the A/V infections). Can we "trust" an A/V solution from M$ that addresses virus infections of M$ products? And is M$ controls both the virus host and the A/V inoculation, does that not create a potential area of abuse - no license/upgrade/whatever, no A/V subscription/update/whatever? As Reagan told Gorbachev, "Let me tell you why we do not trust you..." G On or about 2004.06.17 15:51:19 +0000, DAN MORRILL (dan_20407 () msn com) said:
You make anti virus software sound like a gun lock on a 9MM. Does it really matter who is in the anti-virus market? If Microsoft goes that way, and they have the best knowledge of what they created, what we can reasonably expect to see in the words of Bill Gates "Innovation, with rich user features, deeply embeded in our software". So, we can have an AV product that does great things, but maybe only 2% of it will be used, and because it is a microsoft product, we can expect patches every month, with known and unknown vulnerabilites from day
one. -- Gregory A. Gilliss, CISSP E-mail: greg () gilliss com Computer Security WWW: http://www.gilliss.com/greg/ PGP Key fingerprint 2F 0B 70 AE 5F 8E 71 7A 2D 86 52 BA B7 83 D9 B4 14 0E 8C A3 _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Current thread:
- Re: MS Anti Virus?, (continued)
- Re: MS Anti Virus? Valdis . Kletnieks (Jun 18)
- MS Anti Virus? http-equiv () excite com (Jun 16)
- MS Anti Virus? Robert Michael Slade (Jun 16)
- Re: MS Anti Virus? DAN MORRILL (Jun 17)
- Re: MS Anti Virus? Eric Paynter (Jun 17)
- Re: MS Anti Virus? Alfie (Jun 17)
- Re: MS Anti Virus? Joshua Levitsky (Jun 17)
- Re: MS Anti Virus? Gregory A. Gilliss (Jun 17)
- Re: MS Anti Virus? Ron DuFresne (Jun 17)
- RE: MS Anti Virus? Poof (Jun 17)
- RE: MS Anti Virus? joe (Jun 18)
- Re: MS Anti Virus? Eric Paynter (Jun 17)
- RE: MS Anti Virus? Dan B. Mann (Jun 17)
- RE: MS Anti Virus? Ron DuFresne (Jun 17)