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Article #4301

re: A user's view of IBM's antivirus/2 (OS/2)

#4301
From: David M. Chess
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1992 16:30
57 lines
3116 bytes
> 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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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
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