ATLANTA (CN) — An attorney for Microsoft asked an 11th Circuit panel on Thursday to uphold a Florida federal judge’s ruling in favor of the software giant in a false advertising action brought by a cybersecurity competitor.
Arguing on behalf of Microsoft Corporation, attorney Elliot Scherker of Greenberg Traurig urged the three-judge panel to preserve the lower court’s decision in a case filed by TocMail Inc. over allegedly false statements made by Microsoft in the advertising and promotion of its Safe Links software. The technology is a cybersecurity link scanning feature within Microsoft’s cloud-based email filtering service.
“Microsoft’s ads are not literally false,” Scherker said. “We have no evidence of deception at all by anything Microsoft said or did.”
The software, now known as Microsoft Defender for Office 365, protects users from malicious website URLs by analyzing the linked content and blocking the link if the site is bad. It directly competes with TocMail’s namesake product, which also offers protection against links that redirect to harmful content after delivery.
Hackers often use evasion techniques to disguise malicious content, making it appear benign to get around cybersecurity software. IP evasion is one technique where phishing URLs use a visitor’s IP address to decide whether that visitor is a human or a security software and then display benign content to the security scanner and malicious content to the intended victim.
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