Rank: Newbie
Groups: Member
Joined: 7/21/2009
Posts: 3
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Hello i see this
Quote:I started working with A-Squared (Emsisoft) a few weeks ago to try to boost their presence in the US market.
A-Squared and Malwarebytes are both small companies with the same business model. That makes us competitors, which is a good thing-- it drives improvement. Both companies release scan-on-demand software, with the hope that people will upgrade to, in our case, a multi-faceted, top-quality paid version.
Since I frequent the windows fixit forums like this one in my line of work (home and SOHO tech support), I have come to believe that the meteoric rise of Malwarebytes (look at the CNet dowload stats) has been fueled by the attention they have paid to forums like techguy. Then when virus-stricken folks google on their problem, it leads them to many posts with mbam recommendations from expert advisors. That's different than in Germany, A-Squared's biggest market, where people pay more astute attention to head-on-head anti-virus detection rates and then make their choice. A-Squared creams all the competition in that respect, when they are included in reviews (look at the website for particulars). Unfortunately in the US market, who gets reviewed is a matter of money and influence. And most people here probably don't pay as much attention to detection rates, anyway. They often just used what's preloaded on their computer, until it fails them. Then they find you and mbam.
As very technically sharp developers who believe in the "if you build it, they wil come" philosophy, it has puzzled our people that the US market doesn't see a-squared's technical advancement, and has so readily embraced Malwarebyte (which they see as a less capable product).
Let me be frank. A-Squared is not a marketing-driven company. That's a problem. 95% off the staff are developers, who don't believe in designing what they think of as "fluff" into the product. E.g. Norton 360's hold-them-by-the-hand approach. I have tried to make the case that this very market in the US of casual to intermediate users is the place where growth will take place, and that the company needs to ask people what they want, and then develop product. My advocacy of this market-driven approach has been listened to but not well-received yet.
In the same spirit of frankness, A-Squared is a very good product. The developers are baffled by mbam's rise because of the weaknesses they see in the competitor:: a small data base of virus signatures vs. 3+ million, once-per-day updates vs. several times in a 24 hour period, no behavioral analysis module in the paid version, too much "schmoozing" (in their tech-centered opinions), not enough development horsepower, and I could go on. Just today, the ceo of Emsisoft sent me the following:
"We found that mbam uses a filename whitelist to
exclude some good programs from detection (their type of false positive filtering). This is completely crazy, because all you have to do is rename a malware file to one of those 'safe' names and mbam will not detect it anymore. Some of them are:
taskswitch.exe
igfxpers.exe
TDSSmabm.dll
_gotomypc.exe
gotomypc.exe_
ASCIIcatUninst.EXE
FahCore_78.exe
and many more..
This clearly proves to me that the mbam designers are not only just pandering to the online community, they are also just beginners in software development who make
people believe that they're experts." Wow! Pretty scathingly delivered, if you ask me. I think a little humility and pandering is in order. What do people need? Then the product can stand on its own.
To be completely transparent with you, A-Squared does not need to focus on Malwarebytes, except to gain clues to establishing wider usage for our own product, which can then stand on its own, and whose marketing in the US has been flat ignored. I believe I need to talk with techs like you about your nearly exclusive recommendation of mbam on the forums and see if A-Squared's very positive capabilities can get something like equal time here to allow the competition to sort things out.
So, I'm asking you and your very esteemed colleagues (I admired your dedication, ever since my first encounter with ******.***): would you please occasionally use A-Squared as an alternative to mbam and get a feel for yourself as to it's excellent detection and removal capabilities? It won't be hard to work with the log files. I believe that if you do this, you will find it stands above mbam in its detection rates and usefulness. If there is something you don't like about it, we will be very thankful to get feedback from people of your caliber and make adjustments.
Healthy competition is good, and this is not a static market. Give it a try will you? I'll be very interested in your results and am in a position to pass feedback directly to the ceo in Austria and our virtual team of developers around the world
and then i read this:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2334423,00.asp
Which might explains why a2 is not used by expert help forums todate
Code:a-squared Anti-Malware 4.0
Alarming False Positives
There's a dark side to a-squared's stellar malware blocking skills. In testing, I found that it also blocks a variety of perfectly valid programs. I don't just mean behavioral warnings indicating that a program is loading a driver, changing autorun settings, and so on. I mean that it takes a perfectly innocent program and states categorically that it is malware, even displaying an official-looking malware name like Trojan-Proxy.Win32.Delf.bx!IK. I tested it with a dozen PC Magazine utilities and some small programs of my own. Even in this small sample it identified three as malware.
When a-squared flags a valid program as malware, the app "urgently advises" blocking it. Programs thus slandered included the PC Magazine utilities AltTabIt! and HD Heartbeat, as well as a rudimentary browser that I wrote myself. In all three cases, clicking the link for more information online got a page stating that no information was available. And, yes, I double-checked the files with other security products to make sure they hadn't become infected—they hadn't.
I did observe that all of the specific false-positive malware names ended in "!IK," meaning that they came from the Ikarus engine. Ikarus has been tested by only one of the major antivirus labs, Virus Bulletin. Checking their results I found that in six tries Ikarus has not yet attained the VB100% award. Why not? Each failure was wholly or partially due to false positives.
Wrongly identifying valid programs as actual malware is bad enough, but it gets worse. During the malware cleanup test, a-squared quarantined Windows Explorer as a high-risk threat on two systems, wiping out the desktop and taskbar. I was able to rescue Windows Explorer from quarantine and relaunch it using Task Manager. I doubt the average user would have known how to do so.
On another test system, a-squared quarantined Internet Explorer and tried unsuccessfully to quarantine the essential Windows component svchost.exe. The quarantine list identified both as associated with high-risk threats, though the Emsi Web site didn't have any specific information about these threats. Here again, I verified that the files were not infected by any malware—their destruction was simply collateral damage.
a-squared's shining ability to identify and block malware from installing is tarnished by the surprising number of valid programs also blocked as malware. In testing, it did a poor job of cleaning up infested systems. According to the company this is not a worry, as infested systems should be reformatted. If, like me, you don't enjoy reformatting.....
Why do they need your software if it cause's as much damage as it does good ?
Stellar detection rates mean nothing if you wreck peoples computers and lose their data 
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Rank: Advanced Member
Groups: Member, Moderation
Joined: 11/11/2007
Posts: 260
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Mike Christenson, the person responsible for the PM you quoted, is no longer part of Emsi Software GmbH. He was fired today (actually yesterday) as soon as we became aware of the mails and PMs he was sending out.
I can't say anything more official yet as all people who could give a more official statement right now are not available. You will have to wait until it's day in Austria/Germany (it's 02:40 AM right now).
Regards,
Fabian Wosar [Technical Support]
Emsi Software Team - www.emsisoft.com
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Rank: Newbie
Groups: Member
Joined: 7/21/2009
Posts: 3
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Thankyou Fabien for fast responce,
Emsisoft should be acknowledged for a fast,honest addressal of this unethical and untruthful behaviour by your former employee.
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Rank: Advanced Member
Groups: Moderation
Joined: 1/29/2006
Posts: 466
Location: Witness Protection Program
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thanks Fabian for fast action!!
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