Zone Labs: Anatomy of a Coverup

How angels stay clean and scandals stay silent.

Epilogue

Tom Liston finally tired of Gregor Freund and reported the matter to BugTraq. And although the ensuing mailing list discussion was feverish, the BugTraq editors, obviously feeling allegiance elsewhere, bowed to Zone Labs, allowing the publication of one very flimsy rebuttal on their behalf, and then dutifully killing the entire story.

However at Intrusions the McAfee Money Machine did not fare as well. Network guru after network guru denounced the 'smoke' and the obviously false claims Zone Labs was making. And six months after the discovery, despite the competition having taken measures to fix the 'leak', Zone Labs still cannot produce a functioning beta. Try running tcpdump (windump) on a PC with Zone Alarm running. Try running nmap. Try running any of the accredited network engineering tools in use world-wide - and your machine will crash. And according to Zone Labs, this does not happen, Tom Liston has bats in his belfry, Zone Labs has long since fixed all leaks - and anything else is just a new bug in Windows. ('Bug in Windows'? You find that funny? That is exactly what Gregor Freund continues to claim to The Register's Thomas C Greene.)

And in a startling attack on Zone Labs, the editor of the Intrusions list came out in support of Tom Liston, citing Gregor Freund's attempted coverup as the best reason yet to defend 'full disclosure'.

But Zone Alarm will survive. Gibson's groupies will test the 'new' Zone Alarm and put up with its crashes. Any claim that Freund is simply covering up will be denied. For every claim by Liston that Freund has simply 'hacked' his way into NDIS to specifically stop the Italian packet capture libraries and/or 'raw sockets', there will be a counter-claim by Zone Labs that Gregor has done nothing of the kind.

And who will care? The media who live off McAfee and his sensationalistic Armageddon predictions? Or his ventriloquist work with Steve Gibson? Certainly not. The media live off the likes of McAfee. McAfee makes money for them. Why else would Michelle Delio suddenly leave town?

And the ultimate irony - and perhaps a possible explanation to one of the more embarrassing moments in Internet history - is that Steve Gibson's infamous 'raw sockets' may finally be stopped - on boxes running Zone Alarm at least.

We may have finally found the origins of McAfee's raw sockets hysteria.

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