These companies appear to be operating in the past. 2 years in the past for that matter.
For starters they've decided to come up with a term that not only describes spyware, but other malitious software that tends to get installed in drive-by surfing. Their term of course being "badware". Funny, because everyone in the IT industry has been calling it "malware" for well over 12 months now. It has become the industry accepted term for the EXACT same thing. It also sounds a lot better. "badware" just sounds tacky and sad.
They're also going to attempt to "shame" all these companies by collecting a list of them from end-users and creating a nice big list. It'd be easier just to grab a random spyware program like adaware, spybot search & destroy etc and just look at their protection list. People have attempted to create such sites for the last couple of years. All they really tend to do is grab a quick headline as it's getting set up then dissapear into obscurity, only to raise its head when the malware makers DDOS' the site into submission and it shuts down, never to be heard from again.
Finally, and this is the best bit, "Over time, project organisers said they hope to team up with commercial security software makers to create automated tools to block "badware"." What, you mean like AdAware that has been out commercially for 3 coming on 4 years? Spybot Search & Destroy which has been out commercially for at least 2, but its website says copyright 2000-2006. Or how about the myriad of other programs out there? McAffee, Symantec, and most of the Antivirus vendors now have (albeit limited) malware detection capabilities. What they're saying is their long term goals are, is to get commercial security software makers ... doing what they've been doing for the last year at the very least!
For starters they've decided to come up with a term that not only describes spyware, but other malitious software that tends to get installed in drive-by surfing. Their term of course being "badware". Funny, because everyone in the IT industry has been calling it "malware" for well over 12 months now. It has become the industry accepted term for the EXACT same thing. It also sounds a lot better. "badware" just sounds tacky and sad.
They're also going to attempt to "shame" all these companies by collecting a list of them from end-users and creating a nice big list. It'd be easier just to grab a random spyware program like adaware, spybot search & destroy etc and just look at their protection list. People have attempted to create such sites for the last couple of years. All they really tend to do is grab a quick headline as it's getting set up then dissapear into obscurity, only to raise its head when the malware makers DDOS' the site into submission and it shuts down, never to be heard from again.
Finally, and this is the best bit, "Over time, project organisers said they hope to team up with commercial security software makers to create automated tools to block "badware"." What, you mean like AdAware that has been out commercially for 3 coming on 4 years? Spybot Search & Destroy which has been out commercially for at least 2, but its website says copyright 2000-2006. Or how about the myriad of other programs out there? McAffee, Symantec, and most of the Antivirus vendors now have (albeit limited) malware detection capabilities. What they're saying is their long term goals are, is to get commercial security software makers ... doing what they've been doing for the last year at the very least!
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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/newsbriefs/117/518#518