Microsoft: OneCare should not have been rolled
out 
Tom Espiner ZDNet UK
Published: 16 Mar 2007 13:03 GMT
Microsoft has said that its OneCare security suite has "a problem"
with the underlying antivirus code, and admitted that security is
just "a little part of Microsoft".
Speaking to ZDNet UK exclusively at the CeBIT show in Hanover, a
senior manager for the software giant said that its consumer
security product is far from perfect and that pieces are actually
"missing".
OneCare has been dogged by controversy since its launch last May.
Signs that the software was not up to scratch came earlier this
month when OneCare failed to achieve certification in an
independent test of security products. Shortly before that, it
emerged that the product did not sufficiently protect users of
Microsoft's Vista operating system against malware.
Microsoft apologised for the problems and has issued an update that
has now been automatically pushed out to OneCare customers, to halt
the false positive identification as malware of Outlook .pst and
Outlook Express .dbx files.
Asked about these problems, Arno Edelmann, Microsoft's European
business security product manager, told ZDNet UK on Thursday that
the code itself has pieces missing.
"Usually Microsoft doesn't develop products, we buy products. It's
not a bad product, but bits and pieces are missing," said
Edelmann.
The problem lies with a core technology of OneCare, the GeCAD
antivirus code, and how it interacts with Microsoft mailservers.
According to Edelmann, the Microsoft updates and mailserver
infrastructure do not harmonise.
"It's a problem with the updates, and it's a problem with the
implementation," said Edelmann.
If mail is received from a server running Exchange 2007, users are
unlikely to encounter problems. However, if mail is received from
servers running Exchange 2000 or 2003, the likelihood of
quarantining is high, said Edelmann.
"OneCare is a new product they shouldn't have rolled it out when
they did, but they're fixing the problems now," said
Edelmann.
According to the security manager, security is only a small part of
what Microsoft does, suggesting it does not have as much security
expertise as established security vendors.
"Microsoft is not a security company. Security is important, but
it's just a little part of Microsoft," said Edelmann.
Security vendor Kaspersky said that it was not acceptable for two
Microsoft products such as OneCare and Exchange 2007 to be
incompatible, especially as Microsoft has market dominance.
"Microsoft, welcome to our business," said Eugene Kaspersky, the
founder of the company. "All in all it's a bad thing. It's not
acceptable for Microsoft products to do that. Microsoft dominates
the market. If they do that it creates a big noise, many affected
people, and happy lawyers."
This is not the first time Microsoft has had a problem with OneCare
and Outlook. In January OneCare also erroneously quarantined
Outlook files. However, Kaspersky said that although the problems
then and now were the same, the cause of the problems in January
was different.
"They fixed the first false positive, and now they have the next
one," said Kaspersky.
Kaspersky said that false positives are not just a problem for
Microsoft, but for the whole antivirus industry. He said that about
1 percent of Kaspersky records were false positives, but they were
almost totally stopped by the company's test robots. He added,
however, that sometimes false positives are released by
Kaspersky.
