Applications that use aggressive, evasive and unfair methods to deceive and exploit users for monetary gain have become one of the biggest threats to the anti-virus industry.
Unfortunately, the industry has not done enough to prevent this opportunity to exploit end-users: anti-malware vendors, testers, certifiers, and the monetization industry each have their own approach to installing and operating applications, making the detection of potentially unwanted software challenging.
An industry-wide approach is needed to align our approaches and define clear criteria for both installer and application behaviour. The goal is to create an independent organization, driven by the security industry, to deliver consistency and transparency of guidelines to the software and monetizer industries. An organization that maintains a collective set of requirements and policies, helps to align language on similar criteria, and connect everyone involved in the working group or through an advisory board. Simply put, an organization that builds an environment that everyone can use to keep users safe.
During this Small Talk the latest draft will be presented, followed by an active discussion of our industry approach to define, collect, track and align on criteria for both (potentially) unwanted and clean software.