Pacific Epoch reports:

Chinese anti-virus software company Rising was found on December 19 to have engaged in unfair competition with its Russian competitor Kaspersky, reports Sohu. Tianjin No.1 Intermediate People’s Court ordered Rising to pay RMB451,000 in compensation to Kaspersky, post a public apology for a week, as well as delete all slanderous posts about Kaspersky, according to the report. Kaspersky announced on July 2 that it had sued Rising for unfair competition after Rising said it would pay for slanderous news about Kaspersky to be posted on Internet forums and blogs.

PC Advisor provides the background:

The dispute began back in May, when Kaspersky’s antivirus software identified a Rising Tech update program as a virus. The fault only affected those users with both Kaspersky’s and Rising’s antivirus software installed, but it meant that the update element of Rising’s antispyware software was deleted.

“We fixed the problem as soon as we could,” said David Emm, senior technology consultant at Kaspersky.

However it seems that the Chinese vendor was not amused at all, and days later it alleged in a Chinese statement that Kaspersky’s antivirus software had made 22 mistakes between November 2006 and May 2007.

“Rising were saying things about us which we weren’t happy about,” confirmed Emm. “In fact, what they were saying was so serious that our legal people felt we needed to take action.”

The Chinese subsidiary of Kaspersky therefore filed a lawsuit against Rising late last month, accusing Rising of violating Chinese law by telling users that Kaspersky’s software could damage their computers. In addition, it alleged that Rising defamed it by claiming the company engaged in anti-competitive practices and hired people to attack Rising in online forums and in the media.

When Kaspersky filed the suit Rising piled on by calling them the “king of false positives”.

False positives happen all the time in anti-virus programs, no solution is infallible. But a recent study by German PC magazine c’t claims that anti-virus protection is getting worse. Heise Security reports:

In standard tests, the virus scanners have to recognize known malware. When tested by c’t with more than a million pests that have appeared over the last six months, Avira Antivir and Gdata Antivirus 2008 identified over 99 per cent by their signatures, but Avast, AVG Anti Malware and BitDefender also achieved very good results.

For real protection, however, in view of the flood of new malware, the way these programs cope with new and completely unfamiliar attacks is more important. And that’s where almost all of the products performed significantly worse than just a year ago. The typical recognition rates of their heuristics fell from approximately 40-50 per cent in the last test - at the beginning of 2007 - to a pitiful 20-30 per cent. Only NOD32, with 68 per cent, still delivered a good result, while BitDefender, with 41%, could be called satisfactory.

Hueristic anti-virus blocking, recognition based on file characteristics rather than signatures, is critical to virus protection. The flood of new viruses that are released quarterly are almost impossible to keep up with. That hueristic solutions perform poorly is ominous news. It means that viruses will go undetected longer and thus will propagate to a wider pool of victims.

The article points out that the commercialization of the virus industry has improved the quality of viruses. What is left unsaid is that viruses are increasingly used for commercial purposes. They have become tools for theft, they are increasingly sophisticated, and they are at least one step ahead of the anti-virus vendors.

So while the anti-virus vendors sling mud at each other the real problem grows unabated. A pox on all their houses.

ShareThis