Microsoft Patents Proactive Virus Protection

[dan_maran]

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has just snared a U.S. patent for proactive virus protection, which is how security software helps secure your PC when it encounters shape-shifting malware not already in its antivirus definition file.

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/...oft_paten.html

Did the patent office not do any research at all?

[kinwolf]

Originally Posted by likuidkewl

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/...oft_paten.html

Did the patent office not do any research at all?

Do they ever?

[Baz_kasp]

It's Microsoft...why would they question them?

[Diver]

The US patent system is broken. We have not heard the last of this one.

[Macstorm]

Originally Posted by kinwolf

Do they ever?

You have the ideas.... they have the money

[EASTER]

Is this for Vista only? Or does it also included XP systems?

[emperordarius]

I'd rather say ProPassive protection.

[hurzelpurzel]

Originally Posted by likuidkewl

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/...oft_paten.html

Well deserved by the guys at MS. I am sure they've put a lot of money and effort (e.g. signing contracts to buy up a Romanian AV company) into it

[mercurie]

Romanian College Students may be the next to throw eggs at MS executives.

[dan_maran]

More information:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...hallenged.html

[Saraceno]

Who would have thought Microsoft could be so sneaky?

[Tweakie]

You cannot patent an idea, you can only patent an implementation of that idea. Microsoft knows it very well: they did not try to patent "proactive protection" in general and never claimed they invented it. What they did is to patent a particular implementation of a virtual environment for monitoring the behavior of unknown executables on the windows platform. And in order to do so they provide some details concerning the internal workings of their system, something that have been missed in the blog message cited by the original poster.

For those interested, the text of the patent is here

Now, there exists plenty of other patents on that particular theme (including older ones). And the implementation described is probably not very different from what can be found in some other antivirus software.

What I find confusing in Microsoft's patent is that they initially describe their invention as a "variant detector" and finally describe the implementation of something that could be a "generic heuristic" system (insisting on the fact that they focus on "interesting APIs"). For a simple variant detection approach I believe the kind of approach I described this message, that seems really close to what they are doing, would have been more efficient.