Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: Re: Microsoft AntiSpyware falling furtherbehind
From: "Valdis Shkesters" <valdis () antivirus lv>
Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2005 13:28:19 +0200
But I classify anti-spyware programs in one encampment only - composed of unneeded programs. Does identification of so called spyware technically differ from identification of usual computer virus or worm? No. Is that which now is called spyware (http://antispywarecoalition.org/documents/definitions.htm) withinsphere detected by antiviruses? Yes, it is, with exception of tracking cookies.
I for many years use antivirus which excellently detects all classes of harmful programs. Within last year, using the same antivirus, I have found very large number of active harmful programs (which are called spyware by many) in several hundreds of infected computers. And at least one third of these computers had installed the so called anti-spyware.
From the point of view of an average user until now the word "virus"
was synonym for all harmful programs. Now for large part of them the name "spyware" has been introduced. Why? In order to get money - for antivirus and anti-spyware? Then we will see anti-crimeware tomorrow and anti-terrorware - the day after tomorrow. Best regards, Valdis----- Original Message ----- From: "Nick FitzGerald" <nick () virus-l demon co uk>
To: <full-disclosure () lists grok org uk> Sent: Saturday, October 29, 2005 2:42 PMSubject: Re: [Full-disclosure] Re: Microsoft AntiSpyware falling furtherbehind
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.htmlHosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
_______________________________________________ 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)