Matousec’s New Moves to Recapture the label “Trustworthy”

The faithful reader of my blog will probably remember the critical article I wrote about Matousec and his Firewall Challenges, “Matousec’s Firewall Challenge wrinkle: conflict of interests?” and the honor I granted him to add his Challenges to “Smokey’s Security Weblog Hall of Shame”.

Matousec’s Firewall Challenges are continiuos subject of critism, not only be me but by many other people also. It was clear that Matousec was looking for ways to control reputation damage. We also remember well the possibilty of a re-test of vendors product by Matousec, of course after paying for such favor. In this way, a “bad” test could be curved into a “good” test.

Apparently Matousec is opinion to shut the mouth of criticasters by renaming past month his “Firewall Challenges” into “Proactive Security Challenges”. Almost at the same time he surprised us with the announcement that DIFINEX acquired Matousec.

I have my own ideas about DIFINEX and this sudden move of Matousec. According to Matousec, “DIFINEX is a new company with an interest in Internet projects and online services. DIFINEX focuses on creating, financing and covering projects with medium-sized and large Internet audience”. Matousec is always yelling about “Transparent security”. This is in contradiction with his mysterious explanation about DIFINEX. To earn the label “Trustworthy” it is a must to be open and honest about everything, not only tests and methodics but also about the people that finance these tests: DIFINEX. At the moment this is a Ghost Company.

To me it is obvious that Matousec’s recent moves confirm my negative feelings about him and his tests. More questions raised instead of satisfying previous ones. His tests wrinkle even more than before.

Matousec and his Firewall Challenges Hall of Shame 2008/2011 Awardee

To me it is a great pleasure to announce that Matousec and his so called Firewall Challenges is Smokey’s Security Weblog 2008/2011 Hall of Shame Awardee. He realy did all he could to become awarded, there was no reason to deny him anymore this prestigious Award. Congratulations Matousec, well deserved!

Let’s take a look at my motivation to grant Matousec the honor to become member of The Hall. In my “almighty” wisdom I even decided that his stay in The Hall will be definitive.

In April 2008 I already blogged about wrinkles in Matousec’s Firewall Challenges. Instead of taking serious notice of my critism, he decided to ignore entirely my prewarnings. That was a bad sign, however I decided to provide him with the advantage of doubt.

Mentioned ignorant attitude in the past and his recent Firewall Challenge were sufficient to provide him with the honorable Smokey’s Security Weblog 2008/2011 Hall of Shame Award.

Recapitulation to Award Matousec:

– Labeling Firewalls, Behavior Blockers and HIPS with the generic label “Firewalls” and testing these programs subsequent with equal (firewall related) test procedures. This is just one of the reasons that his tests are completely unacceptable.
– Matousec demonstrated again and again to produce unreliable tests and being an untrustworthy person. Concerning the latter, I am thinking at his commercial activities related to his tests.

Conclusion: Matousec’s tests are misleading the reader, disadvantaging several vendors in a unacceptable way and his commercial activities in relation to his tests can be labeled as dubious. My advice: stay far away from his so called “tests”. They are not worth the paper they are written on.

Smokey

Matousec’s Firewall Challenge wrinkle: conflict of interests?

From Matousec’s home page:

Firewall Challenge recommendations (2008/04/20 15:16)  Firewall Challenge revealed several notable security products. We have decided to recommend the best products to you via affiliate programs of their vendors. Every product that scores at least 80% in the challenge and thus receives our mark of Very good or Excellent Protection level may become a recommended product. We contact the vendors of such products in order to join their affiliate programs. The vendors that agree and provide us the necessary technical instruments will be linked from the result page of Firewall Challenge.

Apparently Matousec has throwed away the previous appearance of independency and credibility, and took a clear choice for profits, regrettably money is like in many other cases all that count to him.

To me this mean that his firewall tests aren’t reliable anymore, and now another issue raise too: how to rate his previous firewall tests? Are they performed independent? Or is it possible that during these tests a conflict of interests was valid and therefore his tests are biased?

My thanks to Wilders/wat0114 for pointing out Matousec’s new policy.

When and where was Matousec born?

As far i know, on May 19, 2006 Matousec announced his birth and intentions for the first time on CastleCops, and to be sure to get the necessary attention he accomplished that aim via a spam post to reach optimal effect:

http://www.castlecops.com/pstp770180-.html#770180

His declared aim in that post was very noble:

I want to introduce a new security group to you. Our site is called Matousec – Transparent security and we are Internet and security related group of young people with desire in security research.Our first project is the Windows Personal Firewall Analysis and we have already published first results – a review of ZoneAlarm Pro. So, if you have ZoneAlarm installed on your computer you might be very interested in our review. We will continue with Sunbelt Kerio and others, read more.

It is surprising how fast his desire changed into what it is today…

Of course his spam wasn’t appreciated by the CastleCops folks, and very fast a reaction of them followed:

As a matter of ettiquete, matousec, it is considered very impolite to come to someone else’s site and pimp your own site in your very first post. In case you haven’t noticed, we have a fairly extensive review section on this site which includes a number of reviews of most popular firewalls, both pro and con. The discussion topics contain a lot of additional information as well.

Indeed Matousec’s post was very impolite, but he reached his aim: getting attention.

Starting from that day his star was rising, but like all stars, there is a day a star will tumble-down.
That fatal tumble-down event started today.

Update/Continuation 2009-05-03: Matousec’s New Moves to Recapture the label “Trustworthy”

About Smokey’s Security Weblog Hall of Shame Awards

The attentive reader of this blog will have noticed the existence of Smokey’s Security Weblog Hall of Shame Awards. Sole purpose of these Awards is, to improve users experiences and interests concerning all security related issues. Experiences that are many times not satisfying and even really disappointing: users are treated in a way that isn’t acceptable, e.g. by (government) instances and institutions, security vendors, aso aso. The list is long.

The intention of our “Hall of Shame” is to achieve a change of mind in positive way and approvements in behavior and procedures by the Awardees. This all in such way that users interests are served well with it. Therefore the “stay” in the Hall of Shame isn’t by definition for always, all Awardees will have a fair opportunity to make approvements concerning points of critism and to show their good intentions to learn from mistakes made in the past. At the moment this all is accomplished in a satisfying way, the Awardee will be removed from The Hall. The removal will be announced in public, with motivation for the why. A fresh, clean “restart” and opportuntiy for the former Awardees so to speak. OTOH, Awardees that are not willing to learn or refuse cooperation will be marked with the label “bad” and stay forever in The Hall.

All readers of this blog are welcome to provide me with nominations for The Hall. Nominations will only be accepted if they go along with well motivated and/or controlable reasons/sources to nominate. All nominations will be treated strict confidential. Nominations must send to me via email to the address hallofshame {at} smokey-services.eu It is solely up to me and my staff to decide about nominations. Via same email address you are also welcome to provide me with a motivation for removal of a Hall Awardee.

Happy and safe computing!

*** Current Hall of Shame Awardees ***

* HP – Hewlett Packard Company *

* Matousec’s Firewall Challenges *

* Trend Micro Incorporated *