Stan Beer
Tuesday, 24 October 2006 08:48
Your IT -
Home IT
Whatever semblance of unity that may have appeared to exist among anti-virus vendors has been well and truly shattered with a very public announcement by Sophos. In media statement, the UK-based security vendor has taken a dig at security market leaders McAfee and Symantec without mentioning their names by implying that their arguments with Microsoft are fallacious.
"Other anti-virus firms have recently made
high-profile complaints that they are being "locked out" of the Vista
operating system kernel by Microsoft's PatchGuard prevention system.
They argue that this is preventing them from continuing to develop
pro-active protection against new malware, sometimes referred to as
'host intrusion prevention' or 'HIPS'. They claim this action is
anti-competitive," read the Sophos statement.
"However, Sophos argues that its approach to HIPS technology has met
with no problems on both the low-spec and high-spec versions of Windows
Vista. In addition, Sophos claims that Microsoft has so far provided
all the interfaces that Sophos needs for providing this form of
protection," the statement goes on to say.
Sophos also implies that some security vendors, once again without
mentioning Symantec and McAfee by name, may not be up to the technical
challenges posed by Vista.
"A number of anti-virus vendors may be struggling with HIPS because
they haven't coded their solutions with high-spec Vista in mind," said
Richard Jacobs, CTO of Sophos. "We've taken a different approach, by
focusing on catching bad behaviour before it has a chance to occur.
Additionally, we are building our technology by making use of supported
Microsoft interfaces rather than by trying to subvert them. That's why
we're ready for 64-bit Vista, and others aren't."
"It's clearly the case that we and other vendors will now have some
dependency on Microsoft to deliver kernel interfaces for new security
innovations, which could slow us all down," continued Jacobs. "However
this is more than compensated for by the additional security offered by
Vista. PatchGuard is a step in the right direction for customers, and
we believe that security vendors should embrace and work with
PatchGuard rather than fight it."