Tuesday, April 26, 2005
MS AntiSpyWare
I've had Microsoft's AntiSpyWare utility running on my machine for the past couple of months, and this morning is the first time it's had anything to report. It tells me that the program ' ' has been installed somewhere. OK, not giving the program a name is probably a trick to try and hide it, but couldn't AntiSpyWare detect that, and give me some more helpful messages? After a few more clicks I discovered that for some reason RealVNC has been installed on my machine. The info given tells me (accurately) that RealVNC is a type of a program that can be used to take complete remote control of my machine. it also tells me it's a moderate threat. I don't believe it, so I've removed it. in doing so, AntiSpyWare crashed Internet Explorer (thanks - had a lot of stuff open) and it crashed itself. hmmm, not too robust then. My over-riding thought about this is that computer security utilities still over-load the user with information that is meaningless to them. I know what a VNC program is, I know the threat it represents, I can figure out what AntiSpyWare is telling me, but then I work in IT. the average home user needs a dramatic step forward in usability for security products like this.
I've had Microsoft's AntiSpyWare utility running on my machine for the past couple of months, and this morning is the first time it's had anything to report. It tells me that the program ' ' has been installed somewhere. OK, not giving the program a name is probably a trick to try and hide it, but couldn't AntiSpyWare detect that, and give me some more helpful messages? After a few more clicks I discovered that for some reason RealVNC has been installed on my machine. The info given tells me (accurately) that RealVNC is a type of a program that can be used to take complete remote control of my machine. it also tells me it's a moderate threat. I don't believe it, so I've removed it. in doing so, AntiSpyWare crashed Internet Explorer (thanks - had a lot of stuff open) and it crashed itself. hmmm, not too robust then. My over-riding thought about this is that computer security utilities still over-load the user with information that is meaningless to them. I know what a VNC program is, I know the threat it represents, I can figure out what AntiSpyWare is telling me, but then I work in IT. the average home user needs a dramatic step forward in usability for security products like this.
Comments:
I totally agree. This morning I found out that somehow AntiSpyWare had been implemented on my computer (not by me!), and as soon as I opened some files, I got 3-5 different messages telling me that some files are moved from one place to another, that a program has been installed somewhere and that this could be a risk or not. I had no idea what to do, I just clicked whatever came to mind to get rid of the announcements. And I consider myself somewhat experienced, even though IT stuff is not my core competence. So right now my computer might be infected - or not. Thank god I use Firefox instead of IE.
Microsoft's AntiSpyWare is currently beta... hence we should expect some bugs. But I completely agree with unhelpful error messages, we cannot expect non-IT people to understand if application xyz needs abc rights to access the Internet (personal firewall configuration)
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(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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