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Anti-Spyware Fighting: Spybot Vs. Symantec
John Stith
Staff Writer
2006-01-13
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Spybot Search &Destroy (S&D) provides an anti-spyware service. Like others, one downloads the software, keep definitions updated and run the program at regular intervals to keep the adware/spyware out of one's computer. More recently, Spybot had some problems with Symantec and now the word libel has begun to appear in places regarding the two companies.
Here's the story from Spybot's angle:
Back in April 2005, Norton Antivirus by Symantec already had a false positive about one of our products. We couldn't get Symantec to react at first, we wrote an article about that on our website. After that, Symantec could suddenly react, and told us that it would be a question of honor to deal with such things without any publicity. They removed the false positive, and we removed their name from that news article.
Now, we have received more and more complaints over the year that Symantec would recommend to its customers to deinstall Spybot-S&D, because it would corrupt Norton Ghost images. We finally found their knowledgebase article about it, and were a bit surprised to see that while Symantec wants to keep any bad words about their own software out of the public, and deal with it honorably, they have no problems to post wrong facts about the products of their competition on their website without even getting into any contact about this so-called incompability.
Since we wanted to play fair, we gave them a full week to show us evidence that Spybot-S&D would be corrupting Norton Ghost images before we would publically announce this. Mr. Guido Sanchidrian, product marketing manager of Symantec, appeared offended when we told him that his mentioning of honorable non-public discussions in case of incompatibilities seemed to be a farce, but he told us they would take this very seriously and answer on the last day of the given timeframe.
Well, this time is over now, without any explanation why Spybot-S&D would corrupt Norton Ghost images, and I had to threat to sue them with legal action for compensation to get them to remove the name Spybot-S&D.
Still, further promises from Mr. Ingenpass from Symantec to deal with this within the first week of the new year passed without his promised explanation about this incompatibility.
With a second false accusation this year, and no valid explanation given, we can only assume that libel is Symantec's way of trying to force anti-spyware competition out of the market.
We apologize for dragging this into the public, but with continuing complaints from Spybot-S&D users who were told by Symantec support to remove Spybot-S&D because of not existing incompatibilities, and no chance to solve this peacefully, we found this to be the only way to inform our customers that there is no incompatibility, and Symantec can't prove any contrary to what their support documents and people state.
If Spybot keeps up these charges of libel, and there's no reason to think they won't, things with Symantec could get ugly. Symantec is already catching great amounts of grief over their rootkit problem and one wonders how they will weather this problem.
About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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