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Symantec Brings Complaint Against MS to EU

In one of the comments in my past post, the commenter said I should focus more on tech stuff since blogging about the personal stuff can get quite… uninteresting. Although I don’t really understand what her conception of a “blog” is, I would say it was a personal journal unless specified otherwise. But yes, I do like talking about tech stuff too so how ’bout this post to call it even 😉

Symantec Brings Complaint Against MS to EU

linumax writes “Symantec has made a complaint against Microsoft to EC anti-trust regulators over the software giant’s entry into the security market. The “informal” complaint allows the Commission to consider whether or not an anti-trust case is merited. The Commission is the executive branch of the European Union (EU).” From the article: “The news comes on the day Microsoft announced plans to begin offering business users an integrated anti-virus and anti-spyware product called Microsoft Client Protection. A beta version of this product is expected to be released by year’s end. The company is already offering some customers a beta version of its Windows OneCare consumer security software. At issue is Microsoft’s plan to bundle its security software with Windows Vista, the next major version of the Windows operating system due next year.”

via Slashdot

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Checkmate

The whole Symantec “fear-factor” article/stunt has brought the Mac world up-in-arms. I find it sad that most of the negative feedback come from people who are merely over-confident, or complacent… and do not know the real danger that may happen. It’s one thing to be confident in your system – hell even I am confident in my systems (both Windows and Mac), but quite another to expect them to be bullet-proof.

While again, the security architecture of the Unix framework is a formidable barrier for the most part, it still doesn’t mean that it cannot be cracked.

A post I read on a messageboard should put things into perspective:

Complacency will get you 0wn3d.. we should remember there are some fairly serious unpatched vulns still out there in the default install (e.g. iSync), and rootkits in development.

(For an explanation of the vuln, see: http://secunia.com/advisories/13965/. For a fix, see: http://www.drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog-archives/000411.html)

Are you sure that update/game/photoshop filter you just got from p2p is not a trojan that will rootkit your box and turn it into a spambot/kiddiepornserver etc ?

Do you know how to check ? Could you find out if it had happened ?

Since it is a local vulnerability, this is the type of thing someone exploits to completely own your box once they’ve gotten onto your system another way. Meaning if they have direct access to your system (i.e. using the machine themselves, or you running something that allows them access)

In the scenarios mentioned above, this is nothing different from running an infected program from a download, email, etc. The number of incidents involving these types of exploits may be rare, but they are out there. And Symantec’s argument would actually be valid if taken in such context.

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