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Does this product contravene UK consumer protection legislation?

Oldwilliam
This seems to be a very useful software tool for patching/warning the home user about vulnerabilities and about malware such as trojans, but as it's labelled as an "anti-virus" product, and no-one has ever yet demonstrated the existence of a virus for a *nix-based operating system (or else they would have claimed the substantial prize offered for many years by Netproject for infecting a properly-configured Linux box with a virus!), does this product breach UK consumer protection legislation? It certainly claims, by implication, that *nix viruses exist, the truth of which Sophos would have to demonstrate publicly (e.g. to the Advertising Standards Authority) if a complaint was made.
:1000073


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    Oldwilliam,

    If you search Wikipedia for "Linux Malware" you will find a page that lists over a dozen AV applications for linux as well as 30 items under the "Virus" category. It does also mention that the danger of any of these is quite minimal. I know wikipedia isn't the most reliable of sources at times, but I think this is proof enough that viruses ARE possible.

    I know that mailcious code run by a user account can only affect things that the user can affect (ie. not much), but I seem to recall their being a few privlege escalation vulnerabilities in the past (I can't remember where I saw these). Also, I think that OS X users are much more likely to blindly trust software they download and be using an account with root access than a linux user. All it takes to access system files is a single password which most users are probably used to supplying when installing various applications.

    :1000279
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  • 0

    Oldwilliam,

    If you search Wikipedia for "Linux Malware" you will find a page that lists over a dozen AV applications for linux as well as 30 items under the "Virus" category. It does also mention that the danger of any of these is quite minimal. I know wikipedia isn't the most reliable of sources at times, but I think this is proof enough that viruses ARE possible.

    I know that mailcious code run by a user account can only affect things that the user can affect (ie. not much), but I seem to recall their being a few privlege escalation vulnerabilities in the past (I can't remember where I saw these). Also, I think that OS X users are much more likely to blindly trust software they download and be using an account with root access than a linux user. All it takes to access system files is a single password which most users are probably used to supplying when installing various applications.

    :1000279
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