Re: Spamming as a Service in Total Protection

[Nick FitzGerald <nick () virus-l demon co uk>]

Rob Slade wrote:

> http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/19/us-mcafee-idUSTRE80I0A620120119
>
> I post this primarily as a warning to those who have this product installed.
>
> However, I do feel compelled to note that this outfit, along with another that 
> comes in a yellow box, and one particularly trendy product, have had a) a great 
> deal of market success, and b) a number of absolutely stunning failures over the 
> years.  (Which, I suppose, is just another example of how marketing trumps 
> security, every time ...)

And note that this outfit is now owned by Intel and there were all 
kinds of mysterious ramblings about accelerating security software 
functionality by putting elements of this outfit's software in the 
hardware when the purchase was announced.  Imagine your server had this 
functionality in the silicon of its Ethernet chipset to off-load CPU?

It may be something of an annoyance now to update all that software, 
but having to pull and replace the Ethernet cards, or even 
motherboards, of all your servers to fix faulty silicon?

Yeah -- hopefully they will be able to deal with such issues with 
microcode patches and such, but what age of chipsets do you think Intel 
will actively support?

(Full disclosure: I'm on contract to one of the other "outfits" (one 
Rob didn't refer to) but this is purely my own take on such things...)



Regards,

Nick FitzGerald


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