Monday, February 05, 2007

snake oil from eEye digital security

found this eEye digital security press release thanks to the infosec sellout blog... i agree with a lot of what the infosec sellout says about this press release but there's one thing s/he doesn't say, one phrase s/he doesn't use that i think it really needs to be said... in the press release in question, eEye is peddling snake oil...

take a look at this quote:
eEye is combining its own anti-virus dynamic heuristics technology with ‘sandboxing’ technology from leading anti-virus vendor Norman Data Defense to complete Blink Professional 3.0 as a single, small-footprint agent, incorporating multi-layered security methods to protect against both known and unknown vulnerabilities in real-time, thus making it the last security product enterprises and SMBs will need to purchase to stop 100 percent of malware attacks, regardless of signatures or patch updates.
do you see what i see? there's a fairly blatant implication that their technology will stop 100% of malware...

long time readers will probably recall past articles on snake oil and realize that snake oil is something i feel pretty strongly about and that this is a punch i will not pull... least of all in this instance with an example of one of the oldest and best known forms of snake oil in the malware domain...

detecting and/or stopping 100% of viruses (which is a subset of malware) is basically the archetype for anti-malware snake oil... it was the epitome of intellectual dishonesty among the less reputable vendors of the past and a cornerstone of most if not all the anti-malware snake oil to follow... there's no good reason why something like this should have been allowed to slip through the cracks unless eEye doesn't care about the quality of the message it sends out to people - and if that's the case, i would strongly suggest voting with your wallets...

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Great post! You are right I did miss the opportunity to call this what it is: snake oil. I guess I was too busy pointing out the other flaws in this horrible product.