Symantec, Kaspersky Criticized for Cloaking Software
ersion 5 of its Kaspersky Anti-Virus software, first released about a year ago, the company used cloaking techniques to hide "checksum" information that the software used to determine which files on the computer it had or had not scanned.
The Moscow-based security vendor uses the technique to improve the performance of its software, said Emm, who does not believe that Kaspersky’s software poses a security risk. "There’s no vulnerability," he said. "There’s no way in which the technology that we’re implementing can be used by an attacker to actually abuse what we’re doing and cause harm on the user’s system."
While Russinovich agreed that the Symantec and Kaspersky cloaking techniques are not as dangerous as Sony’s, which was ultimately exploited by virus writers, he said that all three vendors were engaging in a practice that was bad for users and IT professionals. "You don’t want IT not knowing what’s on the systems," he said. "Not being able to go to the system to do software inventory and disk space inventory, that’s just not a good idea."
--Robert McMillan, IDG News Service
