I’ve been playing around with different anti-virus software packages the last few days, and still am, which made reading a couple of recent post rather interesting. The first one was by Svetlana Gladkova over at Profy.com where she related her trials and tribulations trying to find a package she was comfortable with. Being Russian she tried a couple of ‘native’ solutions including one from Kaspersky’s.
In the end though she decided to go with new offering from Panda which is the first cloud based anti-virus product on the market. I also gave it a shot but it definitely didn’t want to play nice on my Windows 7 RC install so I was back hunting once more.
However Svetlana said something in her post that caught my eye where she suggested that Microsoft’s new AV program codenamed Morro; a hosted anti-virus program, is something the company should of thought of doing years ago. This sentiment was echoed by Frank Ohlhorst at PC World where he wrote about Morro (emphasis mine)
Microsoft is getting ready to offer Windows users a free antivirus product (code name Morro), something it should have built into one of its operating systems a long time ago.
Well as good as hindsight might be people easily forget that any time Microsoft even mentions the idea of adding an operating system level services that might infringe on lucrative third party businesses all hell breaks loose. How quickly we forget things like Hailstorm or PatchGuard.
The first was cancelled after wide spread uproar over what Microsoft wanted to do with Hailstorm. Then when they announced that they intended with Vista to lock down the OS kernel in such away that only Microsoft software would be able to access it, otherwise known as the PatchGuard system, all hell broke loose.
This meant that there would be no open pipes that the 3rd party security software companies could access for tier software to use. Back when this was all happening I wrote more than a couple posts about it, but it too got pulled in the end. Even today any mention of Microsoft bundling any product with the OS puts them in the cross-hairs of the DoJ and the EU.
Personally I think that an anti-virus, and anti-malware, software package should be a core part of the operating system not just an after thought add-on. I’m not just talking about something like this new Morro application they will be releasing soon. I mean it should be deep in the guts of the OS and yes they should lock the kernel down as they proposed with PatchGuard. Unfortunately we probably will never see this happen.
