Speaking at a technology event near Amsterdam, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that Forefront Client Security, Microsoft"s antivirus and antispyware product for business desktops that has been in development since 2003, will be available "in the next month." The product has been in beta testing for more than a year, and the company"s most recent target for final release is by the end of June. Ballmer characterized the product as an all-in-one security product for PCs in a business environment. Forefront Client Security is based on software Microsoft acquired in its 2003 purchase of antivirus vendor GeCAD. It also includes antispyware technology that Microsoft brought on board in 2004 when it bought Giant Company Software.
In his speech, Ballmer acknowledged that it"s only been in the last five years that Microsoft has made security a priority as it developed new and existing products: "About five years ago, we got a real wake-up call: security issues really started to accelerate on the Internet and in our products. We had built products and designed them in a world [before] the Internet. [When] we started to see any increase in the number of security issues, the first thing we did was committed ourselves to the reliability of our core products."