Clash of the Titans: "Kaspersky Lab" has filed a complaint against Microsoft

[Fritz]

Well, M$ holds a dominant market position and (ab)using that is rather tempting. Look at the effort they put into horsewhipping poor fellow humans into using their browser-like abomination called Internet Explorer.

One thing has me wonder though, why is Kaspersky talking about 10 days? They had months in order to test their stuff with Windows 10 before the final release, just like anybody else.

 

[russ0408]

When Windows Defender first came out it's detection rate was right up there with the best. Then all the AV companies were crying foul. Everyone was downloading Windows Defender it was free and very good. This is why Microsoft went to just the basics for Windows Defender. Microsoft is damned if you and damned if you don't, no win situation.

 

[Fritz]

Now I can't say I followed the history to the letter, but wasn't Defender an add-on first, before it was integrated into the System with Windows 8? Judging from there, I'd say M$ is increasing its efforts in the AV department. As for efficiency, I consider it right there with their usual offers. Half-baked crap.

Now, before you tear me a new one, I do have something of a guideline to technology decisions. A multi-market software company like M$ has its fingers in so many cookie jars that they couldn't do everything exceptionally well, even if they wanted to. That's normal. As for AV companies, AV is all they got. So they have to stay on top of their game if they want to eat. M$ instead could just ditch their efforts next year, serve you with a nice warning window to install a third party AV solution and be done with it. Wouldn't hurt them a bit.

It's like me offering POS solutions to my customers; I go with companies that are heavily invested in what they do: POS software. They have to get it right in order to sustain themselves, whereas Sharp, Casio et.al. could just say "ta hell with it" and switch to watches and microwaves entirely.

As usual, just my US$ 0.02. YMMV.

 

[MalwareBlockerYT]

I feel like Microsoft really is going downhill quickly although Windows Defender has improved. However, no one should actually be using Windows Defender when there are much better free Anti-Virus alternatives. I'm with Kaspersky on this one.

 

[Wave]

This is just becoming more and more hilarious, I wonder if I will find a funnier news thread related to AV companies, people filing complains, etc... This week.

At the end of the day, Microsoft own Windows and therefore of course they want people to be using their own software as opposed to third-parties. Kaspersky need to shut up and stop being jealous over Microsoft and their advantages, or they should pack up and go and make their own Operating System better than Windows, and release that, where all users can have Kaspersky Anti-Virus/Internet-Security pushed onto them.

If Eugene Kaspersky wants to throw his toys out the pram and throw a temper tantrum out of pure jealousy then let him do this - he probably won't get very far, he's wasting time when he could be focusing on more important things to do and he is just showing his true colours... That all he cares about is money. If he cared more for the interest of the users, he would approach the situation calmly and control the outcome - instead of making all sorts of complaints and trying to file lawsuits and all that other rubbish, he would just notify the users of the product that Windows Defender will be enabled by default after the Anniversary Update and that they will need to re-enable the Kaspersky security if they wish to continue using Kaspersky products. It's as simple as that.

However, at the end of the day, let's just remember that all you really need is Windows Defender and to pay attention and do your research, whilst utilising built-in features like SmartScreen and User Account Control. All these additional security products give a majority of the users a false sense of security, especially with their dumb and misleading marketing such as "99.9% detection rate", and so on. Money dominates them, that is all they care about. This is the only reason Kaspersky are complaining against Microsoft... Why else would they care about what Microsoft are doing? They just don't want to lose any customers they had successfully tricked into using their paid products!

I acknowledge some people may not like what Microsoft are doing, and I am not saying I agree with it, but I am talking the truth and saying how it is.

 

[Fritz]

Now I can't blame a company for wanting to make $$$, but I can't understand the problems Kaspersky faced. Back when I researched an AV solution for Win10, their forums where full to the brim with complaints and their release notes had more "Not working yet:" exclusions than any other solution.

F-Secure e.g. worked just fine with Win10 from the get-go, how come they managed to do that with a much smaller team?

 

[Wave]

F-Secure e.g. worked just fine with Windows 10 from the get-go, how come they managed to do that with a much smaller team?

Depends how their features were developed. Some vendors use the same methods for some things, other vendors use different methods for different things, or implement things that other products don't have yet.

 

[Fritz]

Yep. And Kaspersky does things very differently if they had only "10 days" and problems nobody else encountered in this magnitude…

 

[Wave]

Yep. And Kaspersky does things very differently if they had only "10 days" and problems nobody else encountered in this magnitude…

I don't really understand this post but every AV product isn't built the same, but sometimes they do the same things for some features or incorporate the same techniques using different methods. Maybe Kaspersky were doing things that weren't supported the same on Windows 10? Unless I sign up for a job at Kaspersky and join the team as both a kernel-mode and user-mode software engineering professional or find old versions of Kaspersky and reverse it and then compare differences between those details with the new versions, I won't know.

Things relating to self-protection are usually incorporated via the same methods between most vendors... For example, most popular top AV products will work with kernel-mode callbacks such as ObRegisterCallbacks, CmRegisterCallbackEx and FltRegisterFilter. However, Kaspersky does actually have greater self protection than some other large vendors out there... For specific reasons I am unable to detail this or mention any further (don't want to violate rules of certain events).

Whereas with things like virtualisation/emulation, vendors may incorporate this slightly differently, even if they are utilising the same hardware features (e.g. VT-X, AMD-V SVM (Secure Virtual Machine) technology). Kaspersky does actually utilise the hyper-visor, this could have been something that they had to fix for Windows 10 (as an example).

 

[DardiM]

Thanks for the share

(God Save Kaspersky !)

 

[toto]

Microsoft was criticized up to windows 8 for not offering a secure OS, and know that it starts working on windows defender it gets sued . While Microsoft is the owner of Windows, I think it has the right to offer default optimal protection to it's users however it finds it more suitable. Average users can probably install which ever antivirus they want without problems, even if they have to install it after every major upgrade, it's not that big of a deal. I know a lot of users who used Windows 7 without protection at all, so windows defender is definitely better than no protection.

 

[Fritz]

@Wave, while I respect your technical insight, I don't think it's necessary for us customers to judge the whining.

They had the same time to get their ##### straight as anybody else. Months on end. Since getting to run their product on their main platform is their core business, I expect them to do just that. And I don't care if they can't do it because they get their donuts from Dunkin instead of Krispy.

I'm sure some funny callbacks and irky functions may not work any longer the way they used to. That's why they have one of the biggest teams in the industry to find a workaround. It's not really a one-man-show down at Kaspersky's. IIRC, nothing runnning in 64bit was protected when they released or the like. That's not a little function not working or a screen flicker when clicking on a button, that's the whole thing being kaputt.

 

[Wave]

@Wave, while I respect your technical insight, I don't think it's necessary for us customers to judge the whining.

They had the same time to get their ##### straight as anybody else. Months on end. Since getting to run their product on their main platform is their core business, I expect them to do just that. And I don't care if they can't do it because they get their donuts from Dunkin instead of Krispy.

I'm sure some funny callbacks and irky functions may not work any longer the way they used to. That's why they have one of the biggest teams in the industry to find a workaround. It's not really a one-man-show down at Kaspersky's. IIRC, nothing runnning in 64bit was protected when they released or the like. That's not a little function not working or a screen flicker when clicking on a button, that's the whole thing being kaputt.

Cool

 

[DardiM]

“We’ve taken the decision to address official bodies in various countries (including the EU and Russia) with a request to oblige Microsoft to cease its violation of anti-competition legislation and to remove the consequences of that violation.”

If it's really a violation of anti-competition legislation, then I agree With Kaspersky. If not, I agree to not agree

 

[Dani Santos]

@Fritz That may not be enough to fix, test and recode any bugs that the changes. Because they can't get all people working on the changes. Within a company there are diferent jobs which do diferent things and 1 week is not nearly enough to test, fix and recode some driver code to work with a new operating system as complex as kaspesky's driver. As they have to keep people working on the other versions as well.

 

[Fritz]

Agreed @Dani Santos. But they didn't have just a week, that's my point. Windows 10 was introduced to the public on September 30, 2014, RTM followed on July 15, 2015 and public release was on July 29th, 2015. That's a good week and a half with room for an extended vacation and a cherry on top in my book.

 

[tim one]

In short it's an old story, and it is likely that if Microsoft had played clean then it would not have been necessary to get to this point. Also do you remember in the past? If MS had not used secret tricks of the operating system, if MS had not changed the Api without notifying this to harm competitor software, if it is not adhered to the standards and then make products that change the standard that minimum enough to not work with the products of the competition, well all this perhaps would not have happened.

 

[Solarquest]

In my opinion:
If windows was a (almost) safe OS they could decide tot to provide an AV.
Since it's not or they make windows safe or they provide an AV included in the price.
An unsafe is without an AV is an incomplete, dangerous OS.
User should be free to use another AV if they want and it should be easy to add a new AV.
This AV has to be compatible with the OS.

Now, imagine defender gets way better, as the best AV now.
They would kill 90+% of AV companies...so they have to be happy MSFT keeps defender as a basic AV.