Microsoft move sends shivers through antivirus market

IDG News Service - The stocks of major antivirus software vendors traded lower after Microsoft Corp. yesterday announced the release of beta antispyware technology it bought in December and said it would begin giving away an improved tool to remove worms and viruses from its customers' computers.
Symantec Corp.'s share price was down by more than 6% yesterday, and rival McAfee Inc.'s shares fell by about 4% following Microsoft's announcement (see story). While Microsoft's free antivirus and virus-removal tools are not an immediate threat to the dominance of products from those companies, the releases could signal tougher times ahead for desktop security vendors, as Microsoft uses its size and influence to expand into markets now dominated by those companies, industry experts said.
Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Security Business and Technology Unit, said spyware is a major concern for Microsoft customers, who look to the company for help. Spyware accounts for more than one-third of software program crashes on Windows XP that are reported to the company, he said in a document posted on Microsoft's Web page.
Microsoft also said it's releasing a free malicious-software-removal tool that consolidates earlier software tools that eradicated the Blaster, Mydoom and Sasser worms, and that tool will be updated each month to detect and remove new threats as they appear.
Windows customers will be able to receive the malicious-code-removal tool through Windows Update and the Windows Auto Update features, which connect to more than 112 million Windows XP PCs configured to receive updates automatically, Microsoft said.
A Symantec executive downplayed the significance of the news. "It's a natural progression from them -- from free removal tools to a consolidated tool," said Vincent Weafer, senior director of Symantec's security response group. "There's nothing dramatically new here. Protection is still the name of the game."
While Microsoft may be able to clean up systems that have already been infected after major outbreaks of high-profile worms and viruses, its tool won't keep the systems it runs on from getting infected in the first place, and it won't have the breadth of information on viruses, worms, Trojan horse programs and other malicious code that Symantec has, Weafer said.
Nash acknowledged as much. "There's no way you could substitute this for an [antivirus] product. They have encyclopedias of tens of thousands of worms and viruses and offer detection and removal, but also platform protection," he said.
Microsoft is merely responding to the demands of its customers and product support teams in releasing the detection-and-removal tool, Nash said. The company is not