Posted on Friday 16 December 2005
The new spyware remover and ‘pc health’ product from Microsoft, Microsoft Onecare has ended up disabling a popular computer tracking software, Absolute Software’s Computrace LoJack. Onecare has since been patched to prevent this from occuring. From the CNET article:
The OneCare product detects one of our modules as belonging to another application that it does not like, so it puts in place a defense that it does not need to,” Philip Gardner, chief technology officer at Absolute Software in Vancouver, British Columbia, said Tuesday.
Once installed, Windows OneCare’s flags multiple vital Computrace LoJack files as “Win32NewMalware.B” and recommends that users quarantine the files, said David Hackett, a Computrace LoJack user and OneCare tester in Edmonds, Wash.
“These files are not identifiable to users as components of Computrace LoJack, but once quarantined, LoJack will be rendered useless,” Hackett wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com. He reported the issue to Absolute Software after discovering his trouble with its product was related to OneCare.
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Absolute Software is readying a fix for the issue, but has also alerted Microsoft to the problem. “We believe it is their error,” Gardner [chief technology officer at Absolute Software] said.
Laptop computer tracking software would want to appear like a hidden system process, so I wonder if the programming of Absolute’s software had anything to do with it being identified as a suspect.