CA is offering a free beta version of eTrust EZ Antivirus for Windows Vista Beta 2 users. The one-year trial is available for download on CA’s Web site. Primarily, it’s changes to administrator rights management and the Windows Security Center that make old versions of CA’s antivirus software, and likely any antivirus software, incompatible with Vista. According to CA Director of Product Management Stefana Ribaudo-Muller, a virus scan that detects malware affecting another user’s account will bring up a dialog box asking for the rights to clean that file.
Vista will include Windows Defender antispyware and an inbound/outbound firewall, two major components of most security suites. This raises the question of how much additional security protection the Vista user will want from companies like CA.
“We’re not reducing our feature set,” says Ribaudo-Muller, who says that CA is working to make sure that its security products work well with Vista components.
Right now, there are no real-world Vista security threats, although a proof-of-concept virus exploiting a command shell vulnerability was published last year.
