Microsoft's own antivirus fails to secure
Vista
Richard Thurston ZDNet UK
Published: 06 Feb 2007 14:08 GMT
Microsoft's own antivirus software, Live OneCare,
is unable to fully protect Vista users against viruses; and one of
McAfee's antivirus software packages also fails to protect users,
according to independent research released on Friday.
Virus Bulletin, backed by a team of Oxfordshire-based security
researchers, tested 15 antivirus software packages used by
businesses and designed specifically for Vista, Microsoft's newest
operating system, and released to businesses two months ago. The
researchers tested whether each of the antivirus products would
stop a set of viruses known to be currently circulating. In order
to be awarded a pass, the software had to detect all the viruses
with no false positives.
But out of the 15, four failed: Microsoft
Live OneCare 1.5; McAfee VirusScan Enterprise version 8.1i; G DATA
AntiVirusKit 2007 v17.0.6353; and Norman VirusControl v5.90. The
other 11, including software from Computer Associates, Fortinet,
F-Secure, Kaspersky, Sophos and Symantec, detected all the
viruses.
"With the number of delays that we've seen in Vista's release,
there's no excuse for security vendors not to have got their
products right by now," said John Hawes, technical consultant at
Virus Bulletin. "In these days of hourly updates, it's always a
surprise and a disappointment to see major products missing them
[viruses]. Vista cannot fend off today's malware without help from
security products. It certainly looks like people upgrading to the
new platform are going to need additional security
solutions."
Joe Telafici, vice president of operations for McAfee's Avert Labs,
told ZDNet UK that, in his opinion, Virus Bulletin had not used its
latest antivirus updates, causing the failure. He said McAfee would
issue further results with the updated software.
Microsoft pledged to improve Live OneCare. A company spokesperson
told ZDNet UK: "We are looking closely at the methodology and
results of the test to ensure that Windows Live OneCare performs
better in future tests and, most importantly, as part of our
ongoing work to continually enhance Windows Live OneCare."
On the subject of Vista, the Microsoft spokesperson added: "It's
important to remember that no software is 100 percent secure.
Microsoft is working to keep the number of security vulnerabilities
that ship in our products to a minimum, through our Security
Development Lifecycle process, and that work is paying off. The
release of Windows Vista is the first Microsoft operating system to
use the Security Development Lifecycle from start to finish and was
tested more, prior to shipping, than any previous version of
Windows."
