Microsoft to Offer Free Antivirus Protection
June 11, 2009 by John Messina
Microsoft is gearing up to offer Windows users a free real-time antivirus protection. Code name Morro, the antivirus product will be a hosted service. Morro works by routing all users Internet traffic to a Microsoft datacenter, where the application will process the traffic and identify and block malware in real-time, by examining all of the rerouted traffic.
Microsoft says Morro will be released as a public beta first. However there is no word on the final release. The question is will Windows users trust their PC to a beta hosted antivirus product? Or is this just another marketing strategy that will give Windows 7 the perception it has anti-malware technology built-in?
Microsoft claims that Morro will help them build better products in the future, by being on the leading edge of malware protection. This will help Microsoft understand how malware develops, spreads and infiltrates systems.
There will be questions that Microsoft will have to address by the Windows community before they expect users to try their free product. Some of the questions that will need to be answered are:
• Will there be any impact on Windows performance?
• Will Morro be implemented in Microsoft's other Operating Systems?
• What happens when a computer is not connected to the internet?
• Will the product remain up-to-date?
• What user information will be routed to Microsoft's servers?
These are only a few of the many questions that Microsoft will have to answer.
Since Morro is only a real-time malware protection antivirus, I don't see the majority of Windows users switching over to this free service. Companies like Symantec and McAffe also offer spam, identity and network security protection that is not mentioned in Morro's hosting service.
Only time will tell if Morro's real-time malware protection will gain momentum and be of any use to the personal PC community and the corporate IT departments.
Feb 01, 2006 |
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This sounds like it's going to slow down traffic , not sure if I want that.
And this will definitely slow down traffic. The question is, will it slow down traffic enough that regular people will either 1)notice, or 2)care, if they do. Clearly Microsoft's tech people think that this will work, so they must think that the slight delay won't be a big deal to most people.
I'll continue to pay for Norton or McAffee, thank you very much.
Whew...
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Whew. Alot of work laughing that hard!!!
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Forget Windows versus Linux or anything else. This is hands down simply the stupidest idea I have ever heard. What they would *really* like is permission to perform deep packet inspection on all your traffic. That would allow them to derive a massive amount of sociometric data, which they could in turn sell to marketing firms. Once they become more comfortable in their position as your sole portal to the world, they'll offer a directed advertising service.
The hilarious thing is that this would be seen as an alternative to patching the vulnerabilities in their software that the people they propose to protect you from exploit.
"Morro works by routing all users Internet traffic to a Microsoft datacenter, where the application will process the traffic"
Un Phhhttt-king believable. That's like the builder of your new house, who failed to put in proper doors and locks, now offering a "solution", in the form of strip searching all visitors to your house. But then, that's Microsoft. From them, nothing is too stupid to surprise me anymore.
Also, is this going to be like many other Microsoft optional extras? That is to say enforced to users, snuck in as a 'critical' download you cannot remove?
Would not be the first time they have done that.
Oh by the way the traffic loads on the internet infrastructure gets hard to handle at peak times as it is.
More and more people are sharing more and more large files and streaming video. So I would really hate to handle the routing at the MS datacenters...
As for packet sniffing everything that isn't really feasible or desirable for now. Trying to analyze every tcpdump at that volume is impossible for humans and error prone when done by machine. So until the machines get smarter. Besides, do you know how boring most people's web viewing habits are?! :-)
Besides that, security will be improved because Microsoft knows how hackers try to exploit Windows and can detect patterns of security breaches. Even though Microsoft will have taken one step forward, hackers will catchup as usual and exploit the proposed system using more elaborate techniques.
Yes Linux is all well and good, however now that M$ has came out with the 'games for windows' bs, and yes it IS bs, there is no hope for Linux to be able to run games native, or at all unless of course you dont mind spending days or weeks hacking and slashing wine or purchasing crossover....... Speaking of 'games for window$' those games that are built for that bs are no longer compatible with my logitech controller... It seems like M$ is trying to force me into buying there 'special' and to me very uncomfortable xbox controller. And I have no idea how to hack the controller or game to make it work.
little orphan anny and her dog are at the computer. and there is a problem... what should they do?
to morrow! to morrow! i must go get to to morrow!
she stops... and says to her dog..
but its not out yet?
its only a day away... then to morrow, to morrow, i will love you too morrow... your only a day away!!!
[ack!]
Because they already do?
Most internet traffic is already delivered through Cisco and Microsoft datacenters.
Microsoft have been all about control, since Day One (or possibly Day Zero) rather than functionality.
This all-your-data-are-belong-to-us enterprise is no different. They are exporting My Documents, or My Computer where the "My" in question is William Henry Gates III, not you, not I.
Once you get the control issue clear in your mind, the answer becomes awesomely simple: don't use anything supplied or in bondage to Microsoft. No viruses. No adware. No malware. Problem solved, everyone can go home.
He says from his laptop, running Mandriva Linux 2009.1, typing into the Firefox web browser, editing docs with OpenOffice, graphics with GIMP, sounds with Audacity, etc. For free.
Because open source freeware is more secure by far....
Amateurs shouldn't make enterprise recomendations.
Our latest resume for a job will be augmented for a nice tidy fee, in the shadows, to include actuarial statistical analysis on how many productive hours might be lost to our allergies, how favorably our friends view us as team players and if our credit score is nice and tidy, how many times we exceed the average energy use on the new electronic electrical grid with our neat new plug in cars, if we purchased too many rib eyes in the grocery store to be considered a health risk and a potential drain on health care expenditures and..... eventually, just how bad our individual DNA is and the likelihood chronic illness in our future on those markers.
Its a "Brave New World" folks. Privacy-not ever again and increasingly impossible no matter how many work-arounds you may try. Go ahead and take endless pictures of your life-at parties, on the street, in your car-let google post it right along with their pictures of your home, your location on the internet, after all-that be kewlness!! right?
No, it doesn't do that unfortunately. It caches all actions until shutdown. Since you're not really preventing anything, you're jsut delaying the write until shutdown. If your scanner misses it, it's still installed.
All network and computer security is a matter of degrees. You can invest in a higher degree of protection, but the only way to be truely free is to turn it off, unplug it and leave your computer in the garage.
No, they don't. M$ only provides software but they have no control over internet traffic.
Of course it is. It is *BY FAR* more secure and much better coded.
What the hell are you talking about? Standards and control are on two opposite sides of the battle, with open source always fighting for standarization and those who wanted control including MS always against it to lock clients to their products.
Stop making things up as you go.
That's not the way the Sandboxie site describes it.You can manually delete contents of the sandbox or set it to delete everything on shut down.Nothing is written to the hard drive without your explicit permission.
If you pay for these online you already have given at least two corporations your financial information and the passwords used to access these accounts.
And, if you use Opera Mobile or Opera Mini, you already use a data network very similar to what Microsoft is proposing. :)
No, no it's not. It is "open source" meaning that the source code, and by extension, every programming loophole is completely exposed. That is not more secure, that's more secure through trial and error. Combine that with the amount of junk code imported by layman programmers and you'll find the majority of freeware is garbage. For expamle Firefox browser helper objects causing IPv6 protocol shutdowns on embedded Broadcom cards, or the multi-level MAC spoofing loophole created by RedHat v3.5
Ok, that's not right. MS locked home users into IE. That was monopoly through marketing, not through manufacture. Netscape got their case going because MS shut down their ability to use Navigator as a launch board/OS replacement due to the functions that IE could employ being locked down through an internal API that no one was allowed access to. When the API was opened up and IE was decoupled from the MS OS, Navigator still ran like molasses.
I certainly am not. I've been in this field for a long time, and I am considered an expert in it by accolade and experience.
Well, I'm not sure how you make the jump from powered by MS, to insinuating MS can go in and look at any of the data traveling through those servers. They provide the software for 15% of the data centres, yes, but that in no way gives them the right to snoop on the data. Same as if you use Microsoft Windows as your PC operating system, that does not give a Microsoft employee the right to snoop on the contents of your hard drive.
Morro changes that game, by allowing them to nose at any traffic you send across the internet, and do pretty much whatever they like with it. The only way really to stop them, if they do sneak Morro in on the quiet, will be to encrypt all internet traffic before its sent.
Still won't solve the bottlenecking problem this will create however, as 100% of all Internet traffic is routed through 15% of all datacentres.
As for datacenter and hub, those are two wholly different things. Everyone has a datacenter, only the largest of us have an Internet hub. They're completely different.
And if you read your EULA, MS is allowed to look at anything you create with their software. Anything.