Symantec Competing Unfairly Against Spybot?

frankbaird writes "Symantec has been claiming for months that the anti-spyware program Spybot-Search & Destroy corrupts Norton Ghost images. Spybot has tried to convince them this is a false positive. After having been ignored, and this is the second time Symantec has claimed a false positive against Spybot, the makers of Spybot have gone public. They claim that rather than compete fairly with quality products, Symantec is resorting to libel."

Comments

Re:Well then, is it or isn't it?

[quark101]

I routinely pull computer images (Ghost 8.0 Corporate Suite), but that I've seen, there has never been a problem with spybot corrupting the image files. Of the several hundred gigs of images that we have stored, only one has ever gotten corrupted, that I can recall. That one image was of a computer that was most certainly not running Spybot though.

Re:Well then, is it or isn't it?

[_KiTA_]

This situation doesn't surprise me comming from Symantec however. I ditched them around NAV 2001 and never looked back, Especially when you could predict when the next antivirus version would come out because the previous version would "mysteriously" start having problems or crashing about a week before the next version release.

Nor I. I work in a small ISP's callcenter, with aorund 5 other people. Norton products are the bane of my goddamned existance. Half the time you have to disable outgoing email scanning or you just cannot send email, period. Timeout errors all the time. Not only that, try explaining to a customer that it's not your service that is down, but rather, their $200 antivirus program that isn't working properly. Not pretty.

If Norton Internet Security suspects that "something's funny" it will randomly turn off your connection. You can ping from DOS, but you can't surf via IP or Domain Names. The solution? First try turning off the Norton Firewall, if that doesn't work, try uninstalling Norton. Reinstalling TCP/IP or Winsock doesn't even help.

I really cannot tell you how many times I've gotten a random "it doesn't work" call, only to find out that they have Norton and it's causing problems. It's my first question now when someone is having oddball problems with email or DNS errors. "Ah, I see. Do you have Norton on your system by any chance?"

It is important to note that the problems only started in 2003, previous versions of Norton products were fine. In addition Symantec has posted a security warning About their own products. Seems the latest version of their product uses the same trick that Sony's rootkit used.

Oh, and did I also mention that NIS destroys Secure website access even after uninstalling it, unless you fix it by digging through it's options?

If you want a good antivirus, I suggest AVG or Avast. Both are excellent free products that are nowhere near as invasive as Norton.