Article View: comp.virus
Article #4301re: A user's view of IBM's antivirus/2 (OS/2)
From: David M. Chess
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1992 16:30
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1992 16:30
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> From: ygoland@edison.SEAS.UCLA.EDU (The Jester) > In conclusion, IBM's AntiVirus/2 is the friendliest anti-viral program > I have seen. Its easy to install, set up, and use. Glad you liked the program! We're pretty proud of it. I think it's still the only OS/2 anti-virus program that has disinfection features, an easy GUI interface, and all the rest. Brag, brag! *8) > But it's integrity > Management features leave alot to be desired. > this program does not list all files that have changed and how they have > changed. The short answer to this is that it's an anti-virus program, not a change-management or integrity-management program. But that's a cop-out. We did test internally a program that showed you every file that had changed (with hints as to which changes were most likely to be a virus). A few people liked it a lot, but most people found it basically just noise. Since programs change a *lot*, and very very few of those changes are caused by viruses, people got very tired of reading the change reports. Most users didn't want to know about a change unless it was caused by a virus. They didn't want to be told that SETVER.EXE had changed (because they added a SETVER entry), or that 123.EXE had changed (because they upgraded), or that their boot record had changed (because they changed a volume serial number). If enough people tell us that they want their anti-virus program to also help with change management, we'll certainly consider how to do that. But in general change management and virus protection seems to be mostly distinct; the vast majority of changes are non-viral, and if you want to know about them anyway it's probably because you have some other interest besides viruses. As usual, I'd love to hear from anyone who has different data; if there are large classes of users who want to know about every change on their machines, we'd like to help them, too. > Right now when you run a virus > check you only get a message if something goes wrong, nothing else > shows up. Thats great! That's it exactly. If enough people also want to see an entry in the log for every file that has changed, we'll look into making it an option. My fear is that, even if we say otherwise in big letters, people will assume that if an anti-virus program even mentions a file, that file must have a virus in it! *8) DC - - -- - David M. Chess | IBM AntiVirus/DOS and /2, in the U.S.: High Integrity Computing Lab | Retail: 1-800-551-3579 IBM Watson Research | Site Licenses: 1-800-742-2493
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!spool.mu.edu!yale.edu!jvnc.net!netnews.upenn.edu!netnews.cc.lehigh.edu!news From: chess@watson.ibm.com (David M. Chess) Newsgroups: comp.virus Subject: re: A user's view of IBM's antivirus/2 (OS/2) Message-ID: <0019.9212151931.AA10887@barnabas.cert.org> Date: 11 Dec 92 16:30:20 GMT Sender: virus-l@lehigh.edu Lines: 57 Approved: news@netnews.cc.lehigh.edu