Our beef with Microsoft different to Kapersky: McAfee exec

Stan Beer
Monday, 09 October 2006 12:13

Business IT - Security

According to a McAfee executive, the fact that security vendor Kapersky doesn't have a problem with Microsoft's Vista access has no bearing on the issues that the two biggest security players McAfee and Symantec are complaining about.

• Announcements

Both McAfee and Symantec are lobbying hard in Europe to force Microsoft to open up the Vista kernel to security vendors. Microsoft has locked up access to the core of the operating system using tool called Patchguard.

McAfee and Symantec have said that not granting them access will not allow them to protect users' systems from the inside out. However, yesterday Kapersky co-founder and chief executive Natalya Kapersky said that from what the company had seen of Vista, Microsoft was not blocking access to the core.

Today, McAfee Asia Pacific marketing director Allan Bell refuted Kapersky's assertion saying that the solutions that companies like Kapersky and Sophos are at a "different position" to those of McAfee and Symantec.

"We have a lot of focus on host intrusion prevention which is basically designed to be able to stop these zero-day attacks," said Bell.

"One of the big issues is that Hackers will get into the kernel and then be able to hide themselves away using root kit technology.

"Microsoft's position is that the kernel will be safe but they have already been people who have demonstrated that there are ways to get into the kernel."

Bell, however, was vague on why Kapersky's position differs from that of McAfee and Symantec.

"They have different solutions and their public statements reflect their position in terms of their solutions," Bell said.

"What we have an issue with is that Microsoft is not working with the two leading security vendors to make sure that we're in a position to be able to deal with the inevitable hacker attacks which are going to come. We know that users are going to have a problem and we also know that the worst time to be responding is after the attack."

According to Bell, the so-called kernel issue only affects the 64-bit version of Vista which has enhanced security. "In the 32-bit edition, Ultimate Vista has similar issues to XP in that the user is an administrator by default," he said.