I’m curious if anyone has tried Windows Live OneCare (via Amazon note: affiliate link used) with Firefox, and especially with Thunderbird. I personally haven’t tried it. A quick Google search doesn’t turn up to much info. Is it detecting viruses in emails correctly and problem free? Or is it causing chaos? I’d love to hear from someone who has used it.
As a reminder, just because you don’t use Outlook doesn’t mean your immune from viruses. You still need a virus scanner.
9 replies on “Windows Live OneCare”
It definitely doesn’t work, since it uses ActiveX – clicking on the purchase links in Firefox lead you to a lovely page telling you to use IE6.
@neuro: just because you can’t purchase it in Firefox, doesn’t mean you can’t use it once it’s installed.
Lets think… A
MammonsoftMicrosoft AV… I wonder how long it will take for somebody to find a vulnerability in it? LMAO…Wow… This comment system is awesome!
Is it open source, or did you make it yourself?
AJAX, automatic dot-dot-dot to elipsis conversion, I just wish the smilies were hidden until a “Show Smilies” button is pressed (They’re a bit distracting up there)…
I use Windows Live OneCare (at least when I’m not trying Windows Vista for which there is no OneCare version yet). Anyhow, it should work fine. In what I know about how OneCare works, the only thing you might lose is that I believe OneCare registers itself with the Office Antivirus API. Despite the APIs naming, there is nothing preventing Thunderbird or Firefox from using the API.
Other than that, OneCare is a rather layered security product. Instead of providing e-mail scanning, instant messenger scanning, etc. (at least at this point in time), it relies on its components working together. The first line of defense is the inbound firewall. If you download something which would bypass the inbound firewall, then the on-access firewall will scan the file if it gets executed or saved. If that doesn’t catch if, then Windows Defender will catch it if it is known malware that is not a virus. If that still does not catch it, the outbound firewall will stop the application from spreading if it is a virus or some sort of malware that spreads through a network. And if something gets through all of that, your documents should be safe on the OneCare backup.
As for it having a vulnerability because it is a Microsoft product, this is unlikely with the security development lifecycle now used at Microsoft. Systematic problems are integrated into code analysis tools such as FxCop and PreFast. Security related alerts from this software block code checkin generally at Microsoft.
I’m on the extended beta team – yes it works with firefox and thunderbird – it detected loads of old virus’s in my old thunderbird mailbox that symantec never found.
Having said that. it did allow me to save eicar.com onto my hard disk – it only complained when I launched the “virus” – see screenshot on my site
It also used to have major performance issues with thunderbird – mail would be unusable, but this seems to have been fixed in the recent (ie couple months past) releases.
@Andy: thanks for the info!
From what I’ve seen, Windows One Care Live can detect viruses in Thunderbird. My experience is that it checks the entire Inbox file for viruses, sees there is a virus, and automatically quarantines the entire Inbox folder. I didn’t really look into it until today because the account that was messed up was one that never really got mail anyway. I seem to think that One Care makes up viruses as well. I’ve got a few programs (keygens), which I meticulously virus scan with McAfee every time I download them (I make sure McAfee is completely up to date first too). McAfee never had a problem with these files, they came back clean, but recently I noticed that One Care seemed to think these files were infected with “viruses.”
I’m about to get a new Dell laptop and would like to remove the McAfee that comes with it and replace it with One Care. Is there any way of getting the One Care offline on another computer so I can set up the Dell before I attach it to the internet? Or is there some other recommended procedure? I would be grateful for advice.