Webroot Opens Patent Infringement Cases Against Kaspersky, CrowdStrike, Sophos and Trend Micro

Andrezj

Andrezj

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Webroot (as patent holder) and its ultimate corporate parent Open Text (as exclusive licensee) have launched cybersecurity litigation, hitting competitors AO Kaspersky Lab (6:22-cv-00243), CrowdStrike (6:22-cv-00241), Sophos (6:22-cv-00240), and Trend Micro (6:22-cv-00242) with separate Western District of Texas complaints. Six Webroot patents are asserted against each defendant, with a seventh in suit against only Sophos. Targeted are various Internet security, malware detection, and/or endpoint protection offerings provided by each of the defendants.

Open Text and Webroot Launch Cybersecurity Litigation - News | RPX Insight




 
Dave Russo said:
Are they accusing these 4 mentioned group of stealing there patented technology?
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they are accusing them of infringing multiple webroot patents
Zero Knowledge said:
You know it's over for you as a company when you start patent trolling. Got to string out the income from dead products.
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should webroot win even one case the value of its patent will skyrocket, the most valuable patent is the one which a court says was infringed and makes the infringer pay, what this means is a patent upheld in court is much more valuable than one that has not
 
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Anthony Qian said:
If malware is something that could slow down your PC and render it unsuable, Webroot, which repeatedly causes BSODs during scan sessions, falls into that category.
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The experience I had with Webroot was good,(y) I used it for quite some time, very light on the system, like a feather, never had a BSOD in me notebook, on my father's computer still has Webroot installed and is working, already has more than 1 year, never presented any problems. I can not tell you about the effectiveness in detecting malware, ransomware seems to me that @Shadowra did a test once or twice and did not do very well. Other than that on my part nothing to complain about the webroot.:(
 
piquiteco said:
The experience I had with Webroot was good,(y) I used it for quite some time, very light on the system, like a feather, never had a BSOD in me notebook, on my father's computer still has Webroot installed and is working, already has more than 1 year, never presented any problems. I can not tell you about the effectiveness in detecting malware, ransomware seems to me that @Shadowra did a test once or twice and did not do very well. Other than that on my part nothing to complain about the webroot.:(
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I scanned some malware samples with Webroots and it crashed my computer when it tried to remove the detected threats... Overall a very unstable AV product. Can't imagine what will happen when it deals with some ITW threats.
 
Anthony Qian said:
I scanned some malware samples with Webroots and it crashed my computer when it tried to remove the detected threats... Overall a very unstable AV product. Can't imagine what will happen when it deals with some ITW threats.
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I see, it's tricky, so it works fine until the time it encounters a threat, as usual with webroot, it does a "quick" scan every time it detects malware on the machine, leading to a BSOD? maybe it's true what you are saying, how frustrating, so it may be that I didn't have a problem and neither did my dad, because we never encountered any malware. :LOL:That's good to know.(y)
 
When my memory serves right, PrevX (wich was bought by Webroot) was the first AV that had
1. A cloud component for blacklist
2. Offered an heuristics approach based on
a) whether the executable was seen by the community
b) what the age of the executable was and how long it was on the PC
c) what the origin of the executable was
3. Offered an execution trail tracker/behavioral blocker

Panda was so smart to name their anti-virus cloud antivirus, so Panda sort of took away the marketing benefit of PrevX being the first Cloud based AV.

The heuristics approach would now be called machine learning - artificial intelligence. I once had a license of PrevX and I remember it was possible to adjust the sensitivity of the heuristics approach to make it a whitelist like mechanisme (moving the sliders to max).

Also the execution trail tracker, sort of logged the activities of executables and could also be used to revert the actions of malware once the behavioral blocker had decided that the executable had performed to many questionable actions. Windows Defender sort of copied this behavior by using Windows event logger for this (and called WD the first OS-aware antivirus). This type of (roll back) behavior analysis is now common in most ransom ware protection modules of AV's.

Problem with PrevX was that its blacklist was very weak and always scored bottom results in protection tests (based on scanning). Problem with security patents is that they are sometimes generally describe a mechanism and it is hard to proof in court because the technical implementation of such a mechanism nearly always is vendor specific.
 
harlan4096 said:
Old news? Webroot Sues CrowdStrike, Kaspersky, Sophos, Trend Micro | CRN
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2022-12-15_08-24-32.jpg
 
harlan4096 said:
Old news? Webroot Sues CrowdStrike, Kaspersky, Sophos, Trend Micro | CRN
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the filing date is listed at the top of the website as well as on each filing, 3/4/22
the court ruled the cases have merit and is allowing the webroot attorneys to move forward
trend micro has filed a countersuit
the others, kaspersky, sophos, crowdstrike might settle out of court
to follow each case you have to review the case docket
to do view the case docket register at US District Court of Western Texas
 
Max90 said:
When my memory serves right, PrevX (wich was bought by Webroot) was the first AV that had
1. A cloud component for blacklist
2. Offered an heuristics approach based on
a) whether the executable was seen by the community
b) what the age of the executable was and how long it was on the PC
c) what the origin of the executable was
3. Offered an execution trail tracker/behavioral blocker

Panda was so smart to name their anti-virus cloud antivirus, so Panda sort of took away the marketing benefit of PrevX being the first Cloud based AV.

The heuristics approach would now be called machine learning - artificial intelligence. I once had a license of PrevX and I remember it was possible to adjust the sensitivity of the heuristics approach to make it a whitelist like mechanisme (moving the sliders to max).

Also the execution trail tracker, sort of logged the activities of executables and could also be used to revert the actions of malware once the behavioral blocker had decided that the executable had performed to many questionable actions. Windows Defender sort of copied this behavior by using Windows event logger for this (and called WD the first OS-aware antivirus). This type of (roll back) behavior analysis is now common in most ransom ware protection modules of AV's.

Problem with PrevX was that its blacklist was very weak and always scored bottom results in protection tests (based on scanning). Problem with security patents is that they are sometimes generally describe a mechanism and it is hard to proof in court because the technical implementation of such a mechanism nearly always is vendor specific.
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Sounds pretty accurate though I should add that their whitelist component has always seemed to me to be even more fundamental to their proprietary cybersecurity architecture than their blacklist.

Also, I've always sided with Prevx on their assertion that professional testing protocols (as they currently exist) just do not work well with their AV approach. In fact, I'm surprised that you say that Prevx always performed very weakly in tests as, as I recall matters, unlike Webroot they resolutely refused to submit to any tests except for those by SE Labs

On a personal note, my experience was that before moving to Prevx (subsequently of course acquired by Webroot) I had a ton of malware problems, and from the day I changed I never encountered a malware problem again.

Anthony Qian said:
If malware is something that could slow down your PC and render it unsuable, Webroot, which repeatedly causes BSODs during scan sessions, falls into that category.
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Anthony Qian said:
I scanned some malware samples with Webroots and it crashed my computer when it tried to remove the detected threats
Click to expand...

As for Anthony's comments above, I'm no expert on AVs, indeed I'm more or less illiterate regarding anything to do with computer coding 😨, but I do remember one key Prevx developer (Jacques Erasmus if I recall correctly) explaining in a Prevx blog article written IIRC sometime around 2009 on how a key part of their malware detection and removal procedure was forcing a BSOD at various stages of the malware cleanup, triggering on each occasion a fresh Prevx scan, until the process of the malware cleanup was complete — and that it was important to let this process run right through to the end. I of course can't speak for whether what he is describing above is this normal BSOD process or if he is, rather, speaking of irregular BSODs that screwed up his computer.
 
piquiteco said:
The experience I had with Webroot was good,(y) I used it for quite some time, very light on the system, like a feather, never had a BSOD in me notebook, on my father's computer still has Webroot installed and is working, already has more than 1 year, never presented any problems. I can not tell you about the effectiveness in detecting malware, ransomware seems to me that @Shadowra did a test once or twice and did not do very well. Other than that on my part nothing to complain about the webroot.:(
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“Very light on the system”

That’s something that pretty much everyone is in agreement.

People who like Webroot. People who dislike Webroot. People that are indifferent towards the product. And people who think it’s okay. Being light is something they all agree Webroot does incredibly well.
 
it is well established that webroot has serious flaws
webroot has been in maintenance for longer than comodo, other than minor bug fixes webroot has not changed it for over a decade
webroot is known to not rollback ransomware and its cloud sync backups feature permit ransomware to encrypt both the local and cloud backup files

but all of this is pointless with regard to webroot patents being infringed, the product and patents are two different things, the product can be poor in any number of ways yet that has nothing to do with patent infringement, a court upheld patent infringement can be worth a lot of money
 

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