Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: Re: Microsoft AntiSpyware falling furtherbehind
From: Nick FitzGerald <nick () virus-l demon co uk>
Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2005 01:42:02 +1300
Valdis Shkesters wrote:
At first you can take look here http://secunia.com/product/4256/. This summer German magazine ComputerBild compared several popular antispyware products. Test results are available in the forum http://www.rokop-security.de/lofiversion/index.php/t8810.html. Scrolling through detailed figures by categories of harmful programs can be seen. I warn that the figures may be very unpleasant for fans of some products.
...which may simply reflect that they are shite tests, rather than anything especially meaningful about the products?? As a rule, "anti-spyware" products fall into one of two camps: 1. "Never mind the quality, feel the width" -- you can usually pick these because their advertising lays heavy stress on the 43 quadrillion spyware items they claim to detect. These products will remove 17 bazillion entirely harmless items from "normal" systems simply because they happended to be string-matches on filename ("of course you don't want ANY 'unwise.exe' files on your system!"), reg key/value/etc, and so on. 2. Cluefull. These will not have the stupid false-positive rates of the above, but as a result will not apparently score as well on clueless tests of the kind the proponents of the first kind of anti- spyware product push. I'd like to say -- stealing something from a colleague -- "welcome to antivirus 101" but actually, I think things in the anti-spyware testing arena are a lot worse than all but the very, very, very worst ever AV tests AND it seems anti-spyware tests will continue to get worse, rather than better... -- Nick FitzGerald Computer Virus Consulting Ltd. Ph/FAX: +64 3 3267092 _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
Current thread:
- Re: Re: Microsoft AntiSpyware falling furtherbehind Valdis Shkesters (Oct 29)
- Re: Re: Microsoft AntiSpyware falling furtherbehind Nick FitzGerald (Oct 29)
- Re: Re: Microsoft AntiSpyware falling furtherbehind Valdis Shkesters (Oct 30)
- Re: Re: Microsoft AntiSpyware falling furtherbehind Nick FitzGerald (Oct 29)