14 DAY TRIAL // Bitdefender recently released Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition, a free product that targets the Romanian market, but which also encapsulates a few interesting and innovative technologies and philosophies.
After Free Edition was launched, I had the opportunity to have a chat with Bitdefender’s Senior Product Manager, Alex Balan, who was kind enough to provide some details on their latest antivirus solution and the ideas behind its creation.
In the development process, they decided that the problems that may affect the product should be dealt with at the source, instead of resolving them with hacks.
In a perfect example provided by Balan, he talked about the popular anti-cheating software called Punkbuster.
“Let's take for example the online gaming anti-cheating system Punkbuster. Say we're playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare or Counter-Strike. In order to play, we have to connect to a server, but if the server has Punkbuster installed, it verifies through the Punkbuster client if the executed file is clean and hasn't been tampered with,” he said.
It turns out that Punkbuster had an issue with their Active Virus Control (AVC) component since it didn’t know how to handle it. Instead of creating a component that would allow for customers to add exceptions, they went by their own philosophy and contacted Punkbuster to make sure the incident would be resolved from their end.
“[Adding exceptions] would have been the easiest solution, but since we wanted a different approach and go by the Gonzales philosophy, we attacked the problem at its core and we contacted Punkbuster to make sure they wouldn't consider us a threat anymore.”
In reality, it’s really hard to make sure all the applications in the world would get along, but this kind of thinking might be a perfectly viable solution to solving a lot of the incompatibility issued that affect applications.