Microsofts new free AV product: Morro or Lesso?

Rightardia reported on this Microsoft development once before. We have learned that Microsoft plans to use novel approach to provide its free anti-virus service, codenamed Morro. Morro should be available in a public beta version shortly.

"Microsoft Corp is getting ready to unveil a long-anticipated free anti-virus service for personal computers reports Reuters. Unfortunately, it doesn't give a date. It just says it's "testing an early version of the product with its own employee." The trial version or product beta, will be available on its website".

We've been waiting for Morro, code-named after Morro de Sao Paolo beach in Brazil for some time.

Because of the political involvement of the European Commission. Symantec Corp and McAfee have already shown their willingness to go after Microsoft in Europe. The EU is more than willing to discipline misbehaving corporate giants like Microsoft.

It is not clear what impact Morro will have on the security market because it last Microsoft AV product, OneCare was a failure. The new AV product will be hosted on the Internet. Trend Micro HouseCall is another cloud based free service, but it is quite slow.

Morro will work by routing all of a users Internet traffic to a Microsoft data center, where the web-based Morro application will process the traffic and identify and block viruses and malware in real-time, by examining all of the rerouted traffic.

This raises serious questions about performance, off-line security problems and privacy for starters. An Internet based service will introduce latency on a PC during an AV scan. Since Google probably tracks your every move using its toolbar and advertising network, there is reason to route everything through Microsoft. Of course, Google did not cooperate with the Bush Administration when is started bugging the Internet using the fiber optic networks that InterExhange Carriers like AT&T and Verizon operated.

There is one reason why Microsoft will use the Internet. It can probably get away with a cloud-based service, whereas it would be sued in the EU and perhaps in the US if it bundled an AV product with Windows 7.

As one AV competitor, AVG boss JR Smith, said about Morro: "At this point, we're watching in Brussels to ensure they don't bundle it with Windows and trigger about a trillion lawsuits."

And, of course, in Brussels, Neelie Kroes, The European Commissioner for Competition, is solely concerned about competition. Symantec, McAfee, AVG and others will not be driven out of business as other Microsoft competitors were when Microsoft reversed engineered and bundled add-on features with new releases of the operating system.

There are already free versions of AV products that consumers can download such as free AVG, free Avira Antivir and Avast Home Edition. One product is even open source: ClamWin and will run on both servers and clients.

www.clamwin.com/

www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jun/11/microsoft-morro-antivirus