A Bad Week for Symantec

Evan Hughes writes "NeoSmart Technologies has published a scathing editorial regarding 3 high-profile mistakes by Symantec Corp. — all in less than a week. In what seems to be a string of stupid mistakes culminating in the infection of CNN-parent Turner Broadcasting Systems by Rinbot— a virus dedicated to the eradication of Symantec from the known world."

Comments

So this is kinda obvious, but....

[rasafras]

Turner apparently got hit because it had not yet updated the Symantec programs on its computers. A fix for the flaw has been available since May and security experts have repeatedly urged users to protect their computers by applying the update.

Hmm hmm hmm people are dumb.

Re:Is this guy serious?

[SwashbucklingCowboy]

What kind of virus rule updates would you not want to download?

The kind that treat widely installed legitimate programs, e.g. Excel, as a virus.

Re:Just in time for us to migrate to Symantec

[jd142]

I uninstall Symantec Corporate Edition all the time. Works a treat.

We've got an AV server and all of our clients are managed. We set the server up to check Symantec every two hours for updates and those updates are pushed down to the clients almost immediately.

Need to install all of your clients to the latest version (say from 9 -> 10)? Click Tools | Install Client Remotely and push it down from a central location.

We check our clients and any computer that is more than a week out of date is turned on and updated.

The only reason I can think of that so many people are complaining is because they've only used the consumer version. When we get student laptops we immediately remove it and install the corporate version that is free for them. I've never had a problem uninstalling the trialware version of the AV that ships with so many laptops.

Re:AVG

[flyingfsck]

Windows is pretty damn good nowadays, but my Linux web server only goes down when the ISP has a power problem. That happens about once a year. In four years, the machine rebooted 5 times and never once due to Linux.

Re:No great loss

[DigiShaman]

Agreed! Symantec NAV sucks ass nowadays.

While Trend Micro is known to be good, my faith in it has been shattered when I cleaned up a web server that was infected with some unknown virus. It was so nasty, that it disabled the Trend Micro services!!!

Because I use AVG Free at home (and has always prevented infections), I decided to download and install the 30 day trial of AVG for file servers. Needless to day, it found the viri and purged them.

I think I'm on day 8 of the trial period without further incident. Because the trial version of F-Prot also failed, I fairly certain we will go with AVG.

not all that obvious, really

[Gary W. Longsine]

One of my clients has a relatively large Symantec AntiVirus deployment (something like 35,000 Windows PCs). I was, among many other things, directly and soley responsible for their Symantec AntiVirus architecture for several years. I assure you that there are many issues which can be easily overcome at the scale of 300 machines which are pretty close to show stoppers at the 30,000 node scale. I agree that Symantec Enterprise Edition is a reasonable AntiVirus product, but its weakest link, ironically enough, are the issues that arise when trying to deploy, operate, and maintain it at the scale of a real enterprise.