Hotmail dumps McAfee's antivirus for Trend Micro

MSN's Hotmail service, which has almost 200 million users worldwide, has dumped McAfee as its antivirus partner in favor of rival Trend Micro.

According to Microsoft, e-mails and attachments sent or received by any of Hotmail's 187 million Web mail customers will be scanned in real time by Trend Micro's antivirus software beginning Monday.

Hotmail's antivirus service was previously provided by McAfee and the reason for the change is unclear. However, Martin Hoffman, chief executive of Ninemsn, which operates Hotmail in Australia and is half owned by Microsoft, said in a statement that Hotmail will be able to provide a "safer online experience" using Trend Micro's products because they provide "deeper antivirus protection."

"Ninemsn is focused on providing a safer online experience for our Australian customers...We're pleased to work with Trend Micro, to provide deeper antivirus protection for our Hotmail customers," Hoffman said.

Dominic Finnegan, Ninemsn's director of ad products and pre-sales, said in response to e-mailed questions from ZDNet Australia: "We are constantly evaluating the needs of our customers as well as our business needs and feel that offering customers a variety of computing experiences further enhances and helps with their online protection.

"Trend has a proven track record and (it) made technical and business sense for us to work with them," Finnegan.

Steve Chang, chairman and founder of Trend Micro, which is best known for its PC-cillin Internet Security product, said in a statement that Trend Micro's vision is to make it safe for people to exchange digital information.

"This belief is behind everything we do for every customer we serve. We are thrilled to extend this to millions more," Chang said.

McAfee was unavailable for comment.

Munir Kotadia of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

[Dachi]

Apples and oranges

You would think building Windows AV software, and building a product that scans hundreds of millions of emails a day on a billion dollar mail platform would be very different animals. So why do desktop AV companies dominate this sector?

[rshew]

Hilarious!

Oh, the irony. McAfee, for some reason, decided a while back to "marry" its antivirus software to Internet Explorer. I use their product and have called on numerous occasions to let them know how short-sighted this decision is.

As it stands, their current release is the last one I will use.

I use IE for Web testing purposes only. On Windows I used Netscape until Mozilla was available and now I'm using Firefox.

I provided McAfee with a number of reasons they should think about making their product browser-friendly, including the fact that future releases of IE (not to mention past ones) may very well no longer work with the on-the-fly customized aspects of the IE browser. You'd think people who make a business of virus security would understand security.

In any case, seeing Microsoft dump McAfee for a different company's product is pretty darn funny as far as I'm concerned.

[PCCRomeo]

Hopefully no effect on MSN Premium and McAfee Partnership

With MSN Premium I get McAfee Personal Firewall Plus and Virus Scan for free. I hope they stay partnered with one another under that program because in my opinion McAfee is the superior antiviral software.

Trend Micro Oops

Got "backorifice" in October on a laptop while not so well protected by Trend Micro on a 3 month trial while visiting Colorado.

My regular ISP uses McAffee. No problem (yet).