Vista's User Account Control (UAC) has been in the news quite much lately. Some love it while others hate. Anyway, it has one great feature compared to other type of Windows security programs - it can detect rootkits before they install.
The finding was noted down in a report published in two German computer magazines some months ago after testing by the respected AV-Test.org, which set out to find out how well antivirus programs fared against known rootkits.
The answer was not particularly well at all, either for Windows XP, or Vista-oriented products. Only four of the 14 specialized anti-rootkit tools managed to achieve a perfect score finding all used 30 rootkits. Those four were AVG Anti-Rootkit Free, GMER, Rootkit Unhooker LE, and Trend Micro Rootkit Buster. None of the seven AV suites found all 30. The best of these was Avira Antivir Premium Security Suite finding 29 active rootkits.
"The results for Vista products were harder to assess because only six rootkits could run on the OS, but the testers had to turn off UAC to get even this far. Vista's UAC itself spotted everything thrown in front of it.", writes PC World. That UAC can tell a user when a rootkit is trying to install itself is not in itself surprising, as Vista is supposedly engineered from the ground up to intercept all applications requests of any significance.
In a period of weeks when Vista has received criticism for its rate of vulnerabilities, the test at least shows that UAC is efficient at stopping those infections from happening automatically.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment