Most computer users in the United States have heard of the leading American antivirus vendors. Manufacturers such as Symantec, McAfee, Computer Associates, and Trend Micro. These companies have a market leading presence in the United States. Microsoft, too, has aspirations to become a key player in this enormous growth market.
In fact, Microsoft bought intellectual property and technology rights from GeCad software in 2003, a company situated in Bucharest, Romania. They also acquired Pelican Software, which had a behaviour orientated security product, as well as the Giant Company Software for spyware and Sybari Software, which controlled virus, spam, and phishing filtering.
A great deal of discussion centered on whether Microsoft would end up in a domineering place in the antivirus market by simply bundling its recently acquired software technologies up with its Windows operating systems at no charge. This is a comparable technique that has been applied in other markets such as word processing and Internet browsers. In fact, this is precisely what did take place. Microsoft has come out with a free product called Microsoft Security Essentials.
It is too soon for me to advise whether MS Security Essentials is a world-class antivirus product, but it is not free to everyone. Microsoft has been battling Windows piracy for a while now with its Windows Genuine Advantage sneaky download and sure enough, this new product from Microsoft will only work on Windows systems and even then, only with operating systems that pass the Windows Genuine Advantage test. (Please click the link at the bottom the page to find out more).
There is nothing wrong with that per se, but it does mean that hardly anyone in the Third World will be able to make use of it, because a pirated operating system comes bundled with every computer that I have ever seen in Asia and probably elsewhere too. People save for years in order to afford a computer and the last thing they worry about when they plug it in is whether the operating system is genuine or not.
Of course there is a number of other antivirus manufacturers prominent in this market. There are many companies with great market presence in other countries that are beginning to become more widely recognized. These vendors include GriSoft from the Czech Republic, Sophos from the United Kingdom, Panda Software from Spain, Kaspersky from Russia, SoftWin from Romania, F-Secure from Finland, Norman from Norway, Arcabit from Poland, VirusBuster from Hungary, Nod from Thailand and AhnLab from South Korea.
It is not yet clear where the industry is heading and everyone in this market faces a rapidly changing scenario. The amount of effort required to find and deliver fixes for new viruses is quite staggering. Malicious programs are becoming more and more complex and the quantity of them is escalating.
Many companies may find themselves without the capital to equal the efforts of those truly bent on creating havoc. The antivirus companies are receiving hundreds of new samples of viruses a day! What is more, the new viruses are getting “smarter” in that they propagate themselves quickly and they often hide themselves too. Some are even smart enough to move around in a system by renaming themselves in an effort to make it difficult to remove them.
Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with researching the Microsoft antivirus software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software