Microsoft Security Essentials Released; Rivals Mock It 465
Bimal writes "After a short three-month beta program, Microsoft is officially releasing Microsoft Security Essentials, its free, real-time consumer anti-malware solution for fighting viruses, spyware, rootkits, and Trojans. MSE is available for Windows XP 32-bit, Windows Vista/7 32-bit, and Windows Vista/7 64-bit. 'Ars puts MSE through its paces and finds an unobtrusive app with a clean interface that protected us in the dark corners of the Internet.' The software received positive notes when in beta, including a nod from the independent testing group AV-Test." But reader CWmike notes that Symantec is trash-talking Microsoft's free offering. Jens Meggers, Symantec's vice president of engineering, dismissed MSE as a "poor product" that will "never be up to snuff." Meggers added, "Microsoft has a really bad track record in security." The GM of Trend Micro's consumer division sniffed, "It's better to use something than to use nothing, but you get what you pay for."
It's working great for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's working great for me (Score:5, Insightful)
They likely would have never understood why you need to pay a lot for top end protection, nor would they likely have payed for it. This is a nice step between.
Re:It's working great for me (Score:5, Insightful)
They likely would have never understood why you need to pay a lot for top end protection, nor would they likely have payed for it.
Hell, I never understood that either. Why should anyone who just forked out $xxx for a brand-new OS then be forced to pay yearly "protection money" as well? Sounds like a racket to me.
Re:It's working great for me (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's working great for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to shoddy engineering.
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Difficult to be balanced if the only leg you can rely on is branded MS.
CC.
Re:It's working great for me (Score:4, Interesting)
AV only works because there are multiple options out there...
If a single product becomes dominant, then the code required to defeat it simply becomes a standard component of any malware... It effectively just becomes an extension of the os which any malware needs to get round in order to function.
Currently any malware that wants to do that, has to deal with multiple different av possibilities which is a lot more work for the malware authors.
Re:It's working great for me (Score:5, Interesting)
They likely would have never understood why you need to pay a lot for top end protection, nor would they likely have payed for it.
Hell, I never understood that either. Why should anyone who just forked out $xxx for a brand-new OS then be forced to pay yearly "protection money" as well? Sounds like a racket to me.
I regularly end up helping people who've bought a new PC which comes infested with the Norton malware. If you don't rip it out before the free trial ends it is virtually impossible to get rid of it. And, of course, if you wait until the trial expires, you've probably caught some nasty - their package is, to put it bluntly, a bloated and useless piece of shit.
It sounds like Microsoft's offering is considerably less obtrusive, and end users will not be hit with the problems I've seen with my preferred solution, Avira [free-av.com].
I've used, and recommended Avira for years, it is completely free for non-commercial use and all you have to put up with is a once-a-day popup advert for their paid products. This is a good thing for non-technical users, it gives them a reminder that their anti-virus has just updated and is still working.
What really, really pissed me off was Vista. XP's security control centre quite happily recognised Avira, but Vista "conveniently" failed to recognise it. This means that unless you're reasonably technically savvy you will get constant nagging that you have no antivirus product. I wonder if that had anything to do with their plans to release this new product.
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What really, really pissed me off was Vista. XP's security control centre quite happily recognised Avira, but Vista "conveniently" failed to recognise it
Kind of a nitpicky thing, but the XP and Vista security centers don't "recognize" anything. Windows has an API to talk to security center - you have to call IAmInstalled32(), IAmOutOfDate32(), IAmDisabledEx(), etc.
Vista isn't conspiring to make your software not work - Avira evidently just doesn't bother to tell Vista's security center that it's installe
[citation needed?] Re:It's working great for me (Score:4, Insightful)
Could you provide a link for this which involves a "serious" anti-virus company (Norton/McAfee/Kaspersky/BitDefender etc.) and an actual released to the field piece of malware. "There are cases" could include the "anti-virus" packages advertised via online ads which actually are malware.
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Re:[citation needed?] Re:It's working great for me (Score:4, Insightful)
The XCP copy protection system is not malware,...
Installed without approval or authorization.
Not removable by normal, non-invasive means.
Reduces performance and functionality of the infected PC.
Sounds like Malware to me.
i was poorly designed and implemented and allowed malware to hide using the same techniques used to hide the XCP system.
So it was poorly designed malware. Noted.
In itself, it was not a program designed to adversely affect the operation of the computer
What are you, an idiot? Widespread crashes aren't adversely affecting the operation of the infected machines? Not to mention that, BY DESIGN, it adversely affects the operation of the CD drive.
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That sounds like a description of a pre-installed copy of Windows to be honest! ;)
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The link provides it. Symantec knew what that POS software was doing and yet it did nothing to identify it. In fact, I recall other mainstream AV never flagged it as malware.
Ref 12: http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2005-110615-2710-99 [symantec.com]
More damning from Schneier (from the Wikipedia link)
Ref 13: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/11/sonys_drm_rootk.html [schneier.com]
Re:"Free" protection is a trojan horse for Onecare (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's working great for me (Score:5, Insightful)
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you'll never see a competing company come out and say "wow, their free product is so good you should use it rather than ours." Their response is not surprising at all
My guess is they are running scared (Score:3, Interesting)
Symantec's security products suck. They are a pain, not particularly good at finding threats, and they slow your system down. Ok well despite that, they manage to hang on because a lot of people know they need virus protection (and Windows will remind you of that fact) and Symantec has name recognition. Unfortunately some of the very best out there are from companies that people have heard of, like ESET. Also, they all cost money, just like Symantec.
So the good AV solutions probably didn't cut in to their m
Since I don't need a graph or pop-ups (Score:5, Insightful)
To tell me it's working, it sounds like pretty much the best thing out there.
When the CEO of your competition derides your product publicly, you know it's got to be good shit.
Re:It's working great for me (Score:4, Interesting)
How about false positives? Antivirus software that checks nested encrypted archives often crashes, or marks as a false positive, files that contain a large amount of compressed data. For example:
42.zip [unforgettable.dk] contains 4.5PB of data, compressed to 42kb. My university's mailserver marks it as a false positive.
selfgz.gz [maximumcompression.com] is a gzip file that decompresses to itself. My university's mailserver tries to decompress it forever to scan all the nested files. It marks it as a false positive, since it was unscannable.
Re:It's working great for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably none.
Besides, technically those aren't "false positives", as in the AV isn't matching a signature...the files are unscannable, so the AV plays it safe.
Re:It's working great for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's working great for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of these files were developed to break mail scanners, so it's logical that they get marked as malware. E-mail may not be the best way to move files that are designed to be harmful to mail servers.
Re:It's working great for me (Score:5, Informative)
42.zip contains 4.5PB of data, compressed to 42kb. My university's mailserver marks it as a false positive.
That's not a false positive at all. It's a well known "exploit" called a Zip Bomb [wikipedia.org]. You think it would be a good thing if unsuspecting users unzipped that file onto their system partition or network drive?
selfgz.gz is a gzip file that decompresses to itself. My university's mailserver tries to decompress it forever to scan all the nested files. It marks it as a false positive
You can call this a false positive, but that implies the original file was useful to begin with. As somebody else pointed out, this is just designed to screw with mail servers (in addition to just being a cleverly written file). Most servers stop extracting nested archives at 6-8 levels deep to prevent this from dragging the server down. Rejecting potentially dangerous (to both mail daemons and users) files like this is better than just blocking all compressed files, isn't it?
Besides, if this MS software is lightweight and really good at catching the bad stuff, but every now and then (as in, once every couple months) gets a "false positive", I'd say it's a winner. It's easy to drag a file out of a software quarantine -- lots easier than removing the latest and greatest rootkit.
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selfgz.gz doesn't seem to have been created to break email servers, merely as a curiosity. It's not even dangerous unless you attempt to recursively extract it without limit, because it is only 210 bytes in size.
To back up my decision, my AV (Avast! Home Edition) scans files as they are downloaded, and it blocked the download of 42.zip as an archive bomb (taking only a couple of seconds to scan it too), but was perfectly happy with selfgz. Though it does end up saying: "Number of scanned files/folders: 33/1
This is the future (Score:3)
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Re:It's working great for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft bought out an antivirus company a couple of years ago. This is simply the rebranding and current version of that company's software.
And you know that virus-writers have figured out how to circumvent more expensive antivirus programs like McAfee, Norton, and PC-Cillin, right? This is why you update the virus database... so that it detects viruses that can disable your antivirus before they get that chance.
Give MS a chance. They could actually have stumbled onto a good product, and it could be something that actually helps the world at large.
I won't be installing it myself, but that's because I'm quite happy with the Avast that I have running. I'll wait for the next report over at av-comparatives [av-comparatives.org] before I pass judgement on it. Interesting to note that for the last several reports, several free options have been in the top 5 and occupied the top spot over all. In the latest report (August 2009), AntiVir had a 99.4% trap rate, Avast has a 98.0% trap rate. (Norton and McAfee had 98.7% and 98.4% trap rates, by comparison) But here's the rub... Avast had the lowest false positive rate of any of the top 5 antivirus programs. Norton had almost 3x as many false positives as Avast. AntiVir had more than 4x as many. And McAfee had more than 8x as many false positives. Out of the top 4 antivirus solutions, I'll stick with Avast.
But they do those tests on a regular basis, and you have no idea how well Microsoft's offering will fare in the next one. It could actually do very well. I wouldn't hold my breath, though... on the most recent testing, while MS's pay-for service tied Avast in false positives, it had a pretty lousy 90% trap rate... Still, that's nowhere near the worst offering out there.
Anyway... do your research before you decide that something is automatically bad just because it comes from Microsoft. Even if it just ties the other software, a 90% trap rate on viruses is better than a 0% from not having antivirus at all. And suggesting that it won't be long before virus writers figure out how to circumvent the software is completely ignoring the fact that virus writers figured out, a long time ago, how to circumvent commercial offerings like Norton and McAfee, and that hasn't actually hurt their trap rates at all.
When pressed... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:When pressed... (Score:4, Insightful)
You know a product is good if competitors start shaking in their boots running to government agencies for protections!
If that were the case, IE would be the best browser ever made. :)
You DO know that they're scared, though, if they have to trash it like this. You _should_ be scared if Microsoft enters your segment with a free product. It may not be the best, but that's never stopped Microsoft from crushing competitors in the past.
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Wow, you _really_ missed the point of my post to an impressive degree. Congratulations. If you think I was saying or implying that MSE is a great product, you're driving on the wrong side of the road.
You probably don't remember when Microsoft came out with their own antivirus package as part of DOS 6, do you?
Nope, I was an OS/2 user at the time. Having just come off the Amiga platform (and the Apple 2 platform before that), I was ready for a new doomed-to-market-failure OS. :)
Re:When pressed... (Score:4, Informative)
You probably don't remember when Microsoft came out with their own antivirus package as part of DOS 6, do you? I do. It was nice, for a while. Support fell off when MS decided to change their focus.
Yes I do. It was made for MS by Central Point Software. Then Symantec bought them out to essentialy kill off MSAV by choking off support for it.
Symantec is a bunch of crap (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry to throw Symantec under the bus, but the AV program and AV mentality that they have created amounts to a CPU tax. We don't have 4 core machines, we have 3 cores plus for one for Symantec, which manages to have the deadlock everything while it scans a single file.
Re:Symantec is a bunch of crap (Score:5, Funny)
If you aren't being harassed by a mouth-breathing subnormal, you aren't secure.
Re:Symantec is a bunch of crap (Score:5, Funny)
My father, also in IT, has the theory that Symantec's goal is to consume your computer's resources to the point where a virus would give up and realize that your computer isn't worth being used in a botnet or for extortion.
Symantec shouldn't talk (Score:5, Funny)
Around the computer shop's i've worked at we joke that we'd rather have a virus than norton on our machines, at least the virus won't charge you a fee to mess up your OS.
Re:Symantec shouldn't talk (Score:5, Interesting)
You joke about it, but I say it with a straight face.
I don't do a lot of virus removal - maybe one per week, just as a service for friends and friends of friends - but about 30% of those "virus" removals are actually tossing out Antivirus and Firewall products.
Ethernet broken? Programs taking 4 minutes to start and 30 minutes to install? Horrible graphical lag, and start menu lockups? Can't shut down the computer or open IE?
First thing I do is disable the AV already on the computer, to check if that's causing it. 30% isn't "usually", but it's high enough that I can't help but want to scream "WTF" at these AV vendors.
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This may account for another 30%, which does make it usually.
Pot/Kettle (Score:2)
Pot, meet kettle.
Re:Pot/Kettle (Score:4, Insightful)
Pot, meet Kettle! (Score:5, Informative)
Symantec's products aren't exactly admired for security and effectiveness in recent years. Pot, meet Kettle,
Get what you pay for? (Score:5, Interesting)
Last I checked some of the highest detection rate AV solutions also happen to be free.
I use Avira AntiVir, which came in #2 in the last comparative study I read. It's gratis, with the sole "cost" of a popup-ad every 24h, disabled in the paid version (or for free, if you know how to set up a local security policy under windows and don't mind breaking the EULA).
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The vendors spread FUD because they are afraid that customers will make the very reasonable decision that they do not need to buy security tools when MS is giving them away. This might be especially true in corporate environments trying to cut costs. One wonders if this is one way that MS c
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What was #1? NOD32? (That's all we sell at my tech shop.)
Unbiased review? (Score:5, Informative)
So let's see, independent groups give positive reviews. One of the main competitors give it a negative review. Who to believe?
Re:Unbiased review? (Score:5, Funny)
It's kdawson, if Microsoft somehow cured the common cold his headline would be "Microsoft technology responsible for deaths of trillions of living organisms".
Re:Unbiased review? (Score:4, Informative)
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You must be... Oh wait.
Microsoft about to kill another industry? (Score:3, Interesting)
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But thats a bit like saying the memory manager in Linux locks out commercial memory managers. DOS should have had better memory management from the word go, along with 1000 other obvious things.
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What I'd like to know is why upper memory, which btw is easily accessible in real mode, requires a fancy device driver like EMM386.
If it were up to me I'd just as soon followed the toolbox principle of "every program should do one thing and do it well".
I would rather write a UMB.SYS to handle the grunt work and factor that out of the expanded memory manager.
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No kidding (Score:4, Informative)
Besides if you want to blame anyone for the death of QEMM other than themselves, well you'd be blaming Intel. The writing was on the wall for memory managers when the 80386 came out. Protected mode meant that all that shit would no longer be necessary since apps would get flat virtual memory spaces presented to them, no segmentation or tricky BS needed. All memory would be equal.
QEMM continued to sell after memmaker came out because it did work far better. Its sales started dying with Windows, since it didn't do anything for you. Windows 95 was when it was all over.
Please remember that the conventional memory/640k thing was NOT a Microsoft creation. It was a combination of Intel and IBM. The 8088 had 20 bits of addressing, giving it 1MB of addressable memory. Now on a system, actual RAM itself isn't the only thing that needs memory addresses. Hardware, notably video memory but other things as well, need to have memory addresses to be used. So IBM divided the addressing as 640k for system RAM, 384k for other usage. At the time they made the system, this was not a problem as you couldn't get 640k of memory. Later the limit got hit.
Thus whenever you ran an Intel processor in 16-bit mode, this is how addressing was done. Still true to this day. Modern Intel and AMD CPUs boot up in 16-bit real mode and they still address memory in this fashion. However the OS boot loader switches them over to protected or long mode and then it isn't an issue.
You still can run in to similar issues though, at least on 32-bit systems. You discover that on 32-bit systems you hit the 3.something GB limit. You knock 4GB of memory in to it, yet only 3.something (the something varies) are available to the OS. Why? Hardware that uses memory mapped IO. Your video card, sound card, etc. They all need memory addresses in the 4GB space the CPU can use. As such it can't actually address all 4GB of physical RAM. Wasn't a problem for a long time as 4GB was way more addresses than a system would have RAM, but no longer.
64-bit systems don't have this problem, as they have 16 exabytes of total address space. Plenty for whatever RAM you've got, plus all the addresses for hardware. However, if in the future we ever do have computers with that much RAM, the same issue will again reappear.
Re:Microsoft about to kill another industry? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I like it and will recommend it to anyone. (Score:5, Informative)
It's a sweet little anti-virus program. A well designed and simple user interface, updates unobtrusively, doesn't bog down the computer and it is very effective at detecting all threats I've thrown its way. It also is easy to tell when it is unhappy thanks to a well designed and simple system tray icon. Credit where credit is due, Microsoft has put together a good program. I've tested this on dozens of machines and have not a single bad thing to say about it, which is not something I would have thought I'd ever say about a Microsoft product.
If I do have a quibble, it's that it requires a validated Windows. If I were Microsoft I'd throw this on automatic Windows Update and push it out to everyone not already running an anti-virus.
Symantec can blow me. I've seen more hosed computers where the owners thought they had current updated Symantec AV just to have me discover that their definitions had last been updated in 2007 or something with no indication from their Symantec AV they were vulnerable.
Huh? (Score:3, Funny)
Now correct me if I'm incorrect, but was I told it's untrue that people in Springfield have no faith? Was I not misinformed?
"You get what you pay for"? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've used Avast Antivirus (free), Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (free) and Comodo Firewall (free) for a couple of years now. I've never had a virus and various other types of malware are promptly and efficiently dealt with.
Trust the inventors of Windows Genuine Advantage with my security? Or freakin' Symantec? I won't bore you with the horrible, hellish experience of getting Norton Antivirus off my machine. It was harder to get rid of than the virus it failed to catch.
Fat chance. I'll stay with something that works, thank you very much.
Microsoft Security Essentials (Score:2)
The only thing Norton is good for... (Score:2)
Is This [youtube.com]
Frankly If this was an actual product Demonstration, Chickens would become Extinct before Norton did anything about it.
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Screw Trend Micro (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Try setting the priority of MsMpEng to BelowNormal or Idle, this should keep it from eating all your CPU time.
You can also try disabling real time protection temporarily if something is going too slow thanks to the slower disk access and CPU.
I seem to recall having some framerate slowdown in online games while playing with the beta. I will have to try this new version though because of all the good reports. It shouldn't be too bad if I disable real time protection while I'm in-game... I'll do my own benc
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Re:Very slow on single core CPU (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the Ars Technica link in the summary, MSE is a superset of Windows Defender, to the point where the MSE installer will disable Windows Defender completely if detected.
As for the single core issue, quite possible. I noticed for example that Vista's Windows automatic update detection check utilized 100% CPU of my (then) single-core machine for several seconds, affecting performance considerably. But when I moved to a dual-core, the effect was completely unnoticeable. Seems as if single-core is no longer considered when testing software performance and impact on the rest of the system.
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According to the Ars Technica link in the summary, MSE is a superset of Windows Defender, to the point where the MSE installer will disable Windows Defender completely if detected.
Not really true. It uses the same malware definition database as Defender, and of course it disables Defender, since it completely replaces its functionality. But the engine is very different - it's rather a cousin of that one used in Microsoft Forefront Security [wikipedia.org].
Ah...my favorite conspiracy theory. (Score:2, Interesting)
Okay, now that Microsoft makes an antivirus, someone explain to me why they haven't simply dedicated all this effort to debugging Windows, closing security holes and stabilizing code? Can anyone now sufficiently explain their motivation to do so? I don't see anymore reason for Microsoft to clean up the mess that they made, now that they've thrown a board over the pothole instead of repaving the frickin' road.
If Microsoft makes Windows secure and stable, then, in theory, the antivirus industry is out of bu
Re:Ah...my favorite conspiracy theory. (Score:4, Insightful)
You are implying that these viruses/spyware aren't being installed by people clicking 'Yes' to "Do you want to run setup.exe from codecs.xxx_teens.com" prompts.
This 'hole' will never be closed. The only option is to develop software which scans for and intercepts these installs for people that can't make an informed judgement for themselves. (i.e 90% of computer users).
that's never mattered (Score:2)
Symantec's vice president of engineering, dismissed MSE as a "poor product" that will "never be up to snuff."
That has been true of every major Microsoft product when it was released; it has never stopped Microsoft from killing its competitors through persistence, pressure, backroom deals, marketing, and deep pockets.
Like an army of dead zombies, Microsoft products may be ugly, stinky, and brainless, but they just won't die.
Leave it to Symantec (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe not this one, but onecare is alright (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, like Symantec has room to talk. (Score:4, Interesting)
I am aware that there are people who still swear by Symantec products, and I do not wish to argue with them. But I was with that family of products ever since Peter Norton put them together into a package, and is is simply not up to the standards that his personal software met... no matter how big their corporation is today.
Boo, Symantec. I use Kaspersky and a few other tools now, and even though it takes several separate tools, I find the whole to be both superior in performance and also less intrusive into my system than Norton Utilities and other Symantec products.
Rootkit Detection (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft purchased Komoku, a developer of RootKit Detection software with clients like the usual government and military suspects, banks, that kind of thing. Komoku's technology has been rolled into Microsoft Security Essentials.
I would think that right there is a good reason to check it out, and possibly implement it in your XP/Win7 system, especially since MS probably had a chance to do some tweaking on the RootKit detection engine using their proprietary knowledge of some of the more obscure aspects of Windows file systems, the still unpublished NTFS specification, etc.
Of course, if you have no RootKits installed, it might be more of a pain than necessary ... after all, every AV app you now have running says nolo problemo, si?
Then again, how would you know?
if you do have a RootKit lurking, I find it very difficult to believe that Norton or Symantec would tell you so ... the whole point of RootKits are to avoid detection, whether by conventional AV applications or otherwise, and to avoid removal by the usual removal tools available to AV product users.
Some RootKits are even stealth-installed by law enforcement, and the "person of interest" isn't supposed to have Norton go all five-alarm on them, if you get my drift. Not that we can be sure this will either ... I'm just sayin' they are not trivial to detect, is all.
It remains to be seen exactly what MicrosoftSecurityEssentials does turn up, but in at least one aspect, you are getting (for free) security software that cost thousands of dollars had you contracted with the original developer prior to Microsoft's acquisition (March 20 2008) and prior to MS's adding at least some of that same software to this new app.
There will be plenty of people who will jump in right away and download MicrosoftSE. If you're one of them, fine; don't change for my sake.
But, the best advice might be wait a week or so, as the prudent should, to see if major issues develop once widespread deployment exposes the suite to a wider set of configurations. If all is well, I say "run her". When MS offers you the equivalent of "free money" I say take it. I never see them refuse mine.
DRM and Sliverlight down your throat (Score:5, Informative)
Just read the license.
Doh!
Well, I always welcome free solutions which enhance overall end users security, but this licence is a no-no for me.
Symantec trash talking (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually they are just trash talking MS in the true spirit of corporate competition. It is like brushing teeth in the morning for them. You are not taken seriously as a competitor if you don't issue some form of short press conference where you can say how bad everything but your own products is.
The truth is, through my "fixing" of countless laptops ridden with Symantec products, I can honestly say, disregarding their security track record, I despise and resent their products as much as I ever could. Large, monolithic but with 10 services to get rid of, poorly uninstalling or not uninstalling at all, horrible user interfaces - at least Microsoft products are benign compared to Symantec, use FAR FEWER resources to the point where you don't notice them (but they still do the job), have usually quite well designed GUIs and remove themselves without question. Thing is, Microsoft has different divisions, and clearly divisions that work on Windows Defender, Windows OneCare Live, and now Windows Security Essentials are, by evidence, not the same division that work on builtin Windows security, although situation seems to be improving on the latter.
Symantec and those corporate benemoths have been preying on customer fear for malware, and feeding us crap for more than ten years now. There was once Peter Norton and his Norton Commander, ever since that it went downhill with all things related to him and his company. Symantec has a lot of fat around the waist now. And they are afraid Microsoft is onto them.
Dysfunctional Family Circus (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole anti-virus industry is kind of like a dysfunctional family sitcom, with Microsoft as the wacky uncle whose crazy antics ironically bring in new customers for the family business by the end of every episode. Every other season the crazy uncle threatens to leave and the kids go nuts trying to convince him he can't make it without them, but everyone knows he's going to be back by next season's premiere. This story arc is no different.
The funniest episodes are when the kids go out and try and pitch woo. They seem to think that everyone else is crazy as "Uncle Mike" and leave a trail of property damage all over town as they fail to convince Apple and Palm and everyone else that their nutty schemes are JUST what they need for success.
Re:Microsoft Security Essentials... (Score:4, Interesting)
A virtual virus can be as bad as a real virus. Deleted files and pirated bandwidth are the same either way.
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I see. So you want to explain to my parents why their data went away and, no, I can't get it back without spending a few hours implementing a rigorous and thorough virtual infrastructure on their home computer?
Re:Microsoft Security Essentials... (Score:4, Insightful)
And what, use a fresh drive image every time you boot up the virtual machine?
It's still the same problem except it's possible to detect virtual rootkits from the host OS.
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And what, use a fresh drive image every time you boot up the virtual machine?
It's still the same problem except it's possible to detect virtual rootkits from the host OS.
No, only use the VM for specific, limited purposes where there is no easily-usable Linux alternative. Although the snapshots or fresh image idea sounds promising too...
A couple of years ago, a friend I've ended up doing free support for (c'mon, we all have a few) wanted a new computer. She ended up with a nice new dual-core machine with 2 gig RAM and Ubuntu. Virtualbox and XP went on there in case she "needed" windows for anything - it was way faster than any Windows install she'd had on real hardware -
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There is a downside to the solution you have mentioned... You no longer have an excuse to visit your "friend" as much...
Re:Microsoft Security Essentials... (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe he finally figured out that the part of the ladder theory [laddertheory.com] he occupies means he will never get the nookie.
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Linux has less low-hanging crapware for the plucking than Windows, but that's no reason to switch. If she switches for that reason then she still hasn't addressed the underlying problem of clicking YES YES YES YES to everything, and it's going to screw her over in Linux land eventually.
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And what, use a fresh drive image every time you boot up the virtual machine?
Works for me. Of course, all I use a VM for these days is testing my work with IE6/XP, IE7/XP, etc. :)
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But if someone catches a trojan and then directly heads for his bank website to do some transfers, the VM doesn't do shit to protect him. Same goes for worms, spambots and all the other crazy stuff. As long as the VM is running, they are as dangerous as ever. Telling people by running stuff in VMs makes them immune to threats just gives a false sense of security.
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Step one: install Linux
Step two: install your favorite virtualization product
Step three: run Windows in the VM. NEVER let it run the hardware.
Meh. I prefer free-range operating systems.
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Thanks a lot, it totally trashed my windows 95 installation :(
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Great job, AC, summarizing that summary and all. I can see your MIT education really pays for itself.
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Great job, AC, summarizing that summary and all. I can see your MIT education really pays for itself.
Oh dear. You've just made me feel that little bit sadder and geekier today for knowing where that reference is from. And you still haven't got me that beer you owe me.
Re:Bad reviews by... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Symantec? Ha! I would rather have nothing at all than Norton products.
Norton products are great. They've just all been replaced by crappy Symantec products.
Re:Symantec aside... (Score:4, Insightful)
Execuse me if I'm missing something here but shouldn't they fix the security holes to prevent the problem in the first place?
You want MS to block everyone's access to shady porn sites?
Re:Symantec aside... (Score:4, Insightful)
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You're a retard. You haven't used the product but you _know_ it sucks. Right.
Opinion: Dismissed.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I generally tell the program to exclude my games directory of real-time virus scanning. Most viruses these days aren't out to try and infect every application in your system, but to dump themselves in temp files or the windows directory (or in the future's case, somewhere in the user's home directory).
So really excluding the games folder for me isn't so muc