.:Computer Defense:.

One thing that I've always had issues with is companies that charge for Anti-Spyware, Anti-Virus, Anti-Malware... whatever you'd like to call it... I spent two years performing support at a college student support desk... In those two years I had plenty of options to recommend to students... but it always came back to the same options... Ad Aware SE Personal Edition and Spybot S&D for Anti-Spyware/Anti-Adware protection... For Anti-Virus it was always Grisoft AVG and avast! Home Edition.. These are great products that are all provided free of charge. We had licenses for students for CA's eTrust AV but who wants to recommend that garbage to anyone. Then you had the students that would come in with Norton or McAfee, step 1 with them was to move them to an AV Vendor that wasn't a resource hog.

One thing I've found is that the "Paid Personal Security Solutions" (or PPSS for short) is that it's a very juvenile crowd. This crowd includes AV Vendors, Anti-Malware Vendors and Personal Firewall Vendors... It will never cease to amaze me, the games that they'll play just to get their name in the headlines.

These companies make their money because Microsoft's products have flaws and people are stupid... those are really the only two reasons... Yet these companies call for a) Microsoft to increase security and b) End user education.. I agree with both of those points, but I don't make a living selling end users PPSSs. These companies call for Microsoft to increase it's security spending and improve the security of it's operating systems... This seems like they'd be shooting themselves in the foot... but they are getting press... and that's the important thing.

So Microsoft responds... They provide Windows Firewall and Microsoft Anti-Spyware... What do the PPSSs do... they cry that these products are useless. More press coverage. So Microsoft responds by improving the Windows Firewall in Vista and improving Windows Defender (Previously Microsoft Anti-Spyware). Now these PPSSs nitpick and point out minor problems, while avoiding the flaws in their own software... They provide their own "market research" that's so heavy with bias you can feel it without reading their "research". I had blogged previously on Agnitum doing this with the Windows Firewall in an attempt to pump up the publicity for their Outpost firewall.

The newest offender in this group is Webroot... Who attacks Windows Defender for failing Webroot's in-house testing...  They mentioned that they used "Trojan horses, adware, key loggers, system monitors, and other unwanted programs, all of which were gathered from in-the-wild threats". They don't provide this list of malware... who's to say the Trojans wouldn't be considered viruses (thus not falling in the realm of Windows Defender) and who defines that they consider "in-the-wild" threats. Perhaps Webroot should publish a complete list of the malware used in their testing and indicate which software found which malware. The next issue I have is that Webroot boosts 100% detection of the threats... This is pure marketing... If they have the malware in their lab... of course they'll find all of it... A real test would be to provide the software, and the samples they used to an independent third party... That person could then gather additional malware on their own and provide a true test of the software.

They also attacked the Windows Defender update cycle, stating "Microsoft currently issues spyware definition updates every seven to 10 days, he says. Webroot, meanwhile, identifies approximately 3,000 new traces of spyware every month. "Users can't wait for a week or so to have their anti-spyware signatures updated," says Eschelbeck."  I was curious about this so I pulled up Windows Updates and the update history page. This page lists checks for new definitions practically every day... and for the month of January, so far, updates have been provided on Jan. 2nd, 5th, 13th, 16th, 19th, 24th, and 25th... That's definitely more than the 3-4 times a month that Webroot has suggested... and there's still room for one or two more this month. Yet Eschelbeck never actually tells us how many times per month Webroot puts out updates.

I'd like to hope that these companies, Agnitum, Webroot and any others that were considering this "silly and childish" path will realize that they are only hurting the the public. These marketing gimmicks are just that... flaky attempts to drive sales... As a potential customer to these companies, I find it insulting that they are wiling to sink so low... and Webroot has joined Agnitum on my "Companies I'll Never Purchase From" list. We don't see C-level employees of companies like Ford and GM standing up and saying "Don't buy their cars... they only visually inspect 1 in every 10,000 cars, we inspect 1 in every 1000"... IT companies are slowly growing up and coming into the world in a lot of cases... So at a time when the public expects something "real" out of them... why resort to school yard tactics and lowball antics.

Right now there's only one word to describe Webroot's tactics... pathetic. If I really wanted to I could take useless shots at them.. "How long did it take their marketing department to come up with that slogan... I'm pretty sure we've all seen it before... all we have to do is swap experts with pediatricians and millions with moms"... but why would I want to do that, I'd be no better than they are.