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Security Vendor McAfee to Pay $50 Million Fine
goombah99 writes "RedHerring.com reports that Security Vendor McAfee has agreed to pay a fine of fifty million dollars stemming from false SEC filing. McAfee cooked its books, overstating its revenues one year by 131%, or half a billion dollars. The method employed was 'channel stuffing' in which compliant re-sellers are effectively paid to buy and hold inventory they may never sell. The shipped goods are booked as revenue and the payments disguised in the books. When it caught up with them, McAfee's stock price crashed, wiping out a billion dollars of shareholder capitalization. The story quotes an analyst saying this maybe the swan song for the once dominant vendor."
Fines are not enough and hurt shareholders more than those who are responsible: the executives. The true punishment should be fines and jail time for the COO, CFO, CEO and all the other Cx0's. What does fining a company do except bleed the shareholders?
Seems like a lot of companies are into hot potato. When did it become frowned upon to care about what happens to the business five or more years down the road?
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I'm not making any accusations, of course, just food for thought. But, with all the corruption in corporate America these days, I'd actually be surprised if something like that hasn't taken place in at least one of the major firms.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
what interests me is what norton/symantec is going to do, now that (one of) their biggest competitors is in such a position.
Since Sarbanes-Oxley has only been in effect since last fiscal year, I wonder if this was caught during a SOX audit or it just got outed on its own.
12:50 - press return.
If I cause damage worth X dollars, you can bet your ass that I will be forced to repay the amount. And yet these guys get away with paying a nickel per dollar? Shouldn't they be forced to compensate the shareholders for their losses? Take it out of the paychecks of all of the top executives! Throw some in jail! At the very least, take back the money these executives made due to the artificially high price.
I've been disgusted with McAfee for a while, but I finally had enough when my parents got a new Dell recently (which ships with McAfee for some configurations).
I installed Firefox and made it the default browser. Then I tried to configure some of the advanced McAfee antivirus options. First, I couldn't even open the interface because McAfee must use IE (with ActiveX) to produce the GUI. Since Firefox was set as default, McAfee just spun and spun fruitlessly until I realized what was happening.
Then, my last name has an apostrophe in it. Alas, McAfee cannot launch the AV scheduler if your logged in user name (on XP Home) contains an apostrophe. That took a LONG time with a McAfee tech to figure out.
Never again. Crappy software for a crappier company.
Both Norton and McAfee are garbage. Both run like a pig, make your system run like a pig, invade the entire system and aren't terribly effective. Use ZoneAlarm Antivirus instead. It's $20 a year, lightweight and I've never had a problem with it in 3 years.
When Norton was getting ready to expire on my mother's computer, it gave her a pop-up message everyday saying that the subscription was going to expire and after that, she wouldn't be protected against new viruses, and gave a link to buy another year's subscription. I did this every day until I uninstalled Norton and installed AVGFree
Free MacMini
Well, that's funny. I don't see ANY nagware out of mcafee and that's part of the problem. I see it updating whenever it's an active subscription, but after that it just doesn't do anything. This is the online/newest version not the old stuff that did nag all the time. The problem I see with McAfee is everything is all online. While that's a good way to do it, customers sign up, then change ISPs, then change ...., and a year later they don't remember what information they used for online registration. The client doesn't even show their email address used so you have to take guesses at it. In several cases they have to buy a brand new AV client simply because they don't have access to the old email address.
Furthermore, I've had cases where their antivirus would keep the anti-spam from working and thus mail would never get delivered. It would just sit there fighting each other. Let's not even talk about the thousands of machines that come into my shop that won't even boot because McAfee is damaged. Boot into safe, uninstall McAfee and the system will boot properly.
I don't disagree that you would see McAfee for years after it's gone (by whatever method), but that's partly because of the poor way they keep the customer informed and handle the account/licensing. Their products are in desperate need of a complete revamping. I even get about 300 "spam from your network" emails because of their crap client a day. Not a single one of them come from my ISP, they just spoof an email address on domains run/hosted by us or spoof our domain in the EHLO statement.
That's not to say Symantec is any better. Up until the 2006 version I was pleased with Norton, but now it's just so in your face that you have to wait 5 minutes after boot up before really doing anything because of a popup screen that says "Norton is up and working properly" kind of crap and will sit there for 30 seconds or until you physically close the window yourself. I've had quite a few times their stupid little popups gets right in my way, or even kicked me out of a game I was playing
Mainstream AV is too intrusive (but I can understand why since users just keep ignoring what it's saying) and in several cases ineffectual. They are all bringing a false sense of security and allow users to think they don't still have to follow good security on their own like....I don't know....not opening email attachments they aren't expecting.
On that note, I'll bet money on the fact that more than 70% of the computers that were infected with the most recent outbreak of the sober virus were all computers purchased with McAfee OEM with only 90 days of service and probably half of those weren't even activated the other half were unknowingly (or uncaring) expired. Gotta love it when OEMs use McAfee as the default OEM product by default.
The thing to remember about nag screens, they are there for a reason. Users always "oh, I just clicked close on that" and then complain about "why do I get viruses", "why do people do that", "is there anything I can do to go after these people?", and my personal favorite "what can I do to keep this from happening again?".
I wasn't happy with Norton 2k4, but it was Norton 2k5 that really made me lose it. Resource hogging, constant badgering. I had the damn software running on a machine that was pretty well protected anyway, so the intrusiveness of it was infuriating.
I've noticed when people have the fancy Norton Security Suites installed, they tend to disable them because it makes it too annoying to browse the internet, for example. You get psychotic firewall notifications every few seconds, and it doesn't really remember what applications are safe, so it bothers you over and over for the same damn program.
It's that funny thing with security...The best security is so restrictive that people ignore it and disable it whereever possible...Like requiring 10 digit passwords, changed monthly...those damn things are always written on a sticky, stuck under the keyboard.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Shouldn't they be forced to compensate the shareholders for their losses?
No. No, they shouldn't. The shareholders bought the stock hoping it would go up. It went down. The shareholders factored in various kinds of risk -- market risk, credit risk, compliance risk. Looks like they should have allowed more for compliance risk in this case, but that's life.
Are you suggesting that whenever a stock goes down because of human stupidity/greed/malice, investors who were holding it at the time should be compensated?
What about when a stock goes up? Should investors with short positions, be compensated?
Who should do the compensating? I don't think McAfee has that kind of money now.
I think it might be a lot simpler and fairer to just expect investors to take responsibility for their own investments.
I also think that it's pretty fucking sad that the above is no longer intuitively obvious to everyone.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Example: In class we were presented with a senario: Company A has been riping off senior citizens under the former CEO, you are now CEO and discover this; what do you do?
About 90% of the class (that's everybody except me) said "do nothing, but have a plan in case somebody figures it out."
I almost puked. My solution was to own up to the errors are set up a reinbursment system to restore the ill-gotten funds (rougly $4 million per the exercise). So techies - there you go: proof that the executive that you think is insane, truely is insane.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
...the single Windows machine in the house (my girlfriend's) to Trend Micro's PC-cillin a few nights ago. The box had been using McAfee for over a year, and I really didn't like how it seemed to refuse to auto-update, and manual update's often buggy use of Active X controls (i.e. IE). I really liked their Scanmail for Exchange product, and I'm glad to use it for client use now, as they appear to have worked out some kinks that were present in earlier versions.
Yes, I can tell that PC-cillin also appears to use Active X for manual updates (would love to be corrected), but, in my case, the auto update works well, so there is no need to use the manual update. And I personally believe that the Trend Micro labs are quicker on the draw on new viruses and trojans, which, in the end, is what I pay for.