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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."
Every experience I have ever had with a Symantec product has been utterly terrible. Generally they cause more problems than they solve.
Furthermore, doesn't Free AVG only update once a week as well?
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
"Effectively free" is still overpriced as far as I am concerned. The amount it slows the system down is unforgivable.
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the kind that crash servers, it is not like they haven't done it before, but for most purposes I agree with you. In a large scale environment with lots of custom apps. you had better be checking these patches prior to general deployment or you WILL get bitten...*speaks from experience*
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
People often don't update their software for years at a time. Hey, it costs. Which is why NAV is designed to update itself automatically. You just have to configure it correctly.
I'm no fan of Symantec. It's perfectly true that they're badly run. Hey, they used to be a lot more than a "security software" company, but all their other business (natural language databases, compilers, IDEs, desktop software, backup software) just died on them. But to blame them for the ineptitude of the CNN's IT department is idiotic.
But they(Symantec) update their signature files almost daily, that means they haven't updated their systems signatures in months. Thats just asking for problems. I mean if they were burned, why not test it offline to see? But to risk a high profile company because maybe you will get burned? I think that is a lack of responsibility on the IT dept. side.
Perhaps. McAfee had a problem once where they were identifying Excel as a virus, but I've never heard of Symantec having such a problem. More likely, the CNN IT staff is either incompetent or just plain stupid.
Also, if they had been burned by Symantec, they should have gone with another vendor's product. A company like CNN not having up to date AV software is inexcusable.
Seconded. The only time I get reboots is when it's required for a security patch, or the occasional "application freaking the #$@%^& out" kinda thing...servers, workstations, all of 'em. And if it weren't for that, I'd be pushing 90-120 day uptimes on most of my machines. Yes, Windows machines.
In fact, I'll get you the data.
Main server has rebooted twice in the last four months for security patches, total ~19 minutes downtime.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
yes, its close to zero cost when you buy the software in store, but its still subscription based, which is where they get you - its like a subsidized cell phone from a major carrier - sure, the phone is zero cost or 50 bucks off, but you've still got to pay for airtime minutes...
The reason Windows has so much malware problems is because it's the most common operating system used, therefore it's in the best interest of the malware developers to write malware for Windows. If the most popular operating system was OS X, then OS X would have the most malware problems. The same goes for Linux or .
This has been disproved so many times it's not even funny. you must be a complete fucking idiot to make such a statement.
Since you seem so smart, how exactly has this been disproven so many times?
Those are mostly worms, which are pretty much old news. Welcome to 2007, where most malware is installed by tricking the user into running something on their computer which then takes it over. Even Microsoft gets it (You're trying to use the mouse. Allow/Deny?). You don't.
>>As far as I know, The exploits in mac or linux don't really have automation in them. And i'm not talking about getting a tool to let some scipt kiddie pown your system. I'm talking about every infection requires some human intervention to be succesful.<<
Windows Vista has the same sort of protection built in as well. However, the protection is triggered so many times by non-malicious programs that users quickly become used to clicking "Yes" to every dialog prompt that pops up. This behavior can then be exploited by virus writers.
The key difference between Linux/Mac and Windows is the quality of the applications written for them. Linux and Mac applications do not normally require root access to function. Therefore, the system almost never has to ask the user to give root permission. And for the rare times that the system does ask for root permission, the event is sufficiently unique that the user takes a close look at what they're trying to do before making a decision.
Windows will be vulnerable to viruses as long as everyday applications require root access to perform.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
I used to swear by it, but around 2002, it just sucked up too much in the way of system resources. I switched to the Corporate client and got back a lot of CPU and memory, ditched the flashy idiot-targeted UI, and kept the engine. For the past 15 years it hasn't let me down once.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
LiveUpdate only updates the defs for Corporate, but you can easily deploy updates via Active Directory. Corporate is the only good product that Symantec makes. I admined 300+ seats of it. Granted Turner has more than 300 seats, but it took me about 10 minutes to get my 300 seats updated. They have no excuse. Someone wasn't on top of this.
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
Thanks for your note. I'm going to reply to it rationally (more or less), hoping that you'll see it and take my comments as constructive criticism rather than just ranting.
First of all, I may have misstated Symantec's support policy, but that is verbatim what I was told by a support engineer. (I even have the email to prove it.) Maybe some internal training is in order?
"...you've downplayed the fact that two years is a long time in the world of security software."
Did I mention the "Veritas products" part of the equation? Two years is barely time to get one's feet wet with most (former) Veritas products. There's also support from other vendors to consider: Sun didn't actually provide support for Volume Manager 4.0 until after 4.1 was released. Already we're into the two year window, and we haven't even started a cluster OS upgrade!
And that's just volume manager. A full-blown enterprise Netbackup installation is a MAJOR event. Here's one scenario I dealt with recently:
NBU 5.0 gets released. After six months of waiting for it to become stable enough to actually use, the company started the implementation. This involved $980k of new hardware (and they already had the tape library and infrastructure in place). The planning, architecture, implementation, cutover, and validation took a total of roughly eight months. That's 14 months after initial release, and we've just gone live with the product. At that point, after over a million dollars of gear and time and effort, I am NOT planning on a major version upgrade in ten months or twenty or thirty. I want a MINIMUM of three years of full support after that point, and five is much more reasonable. We shouldn't be forced to upgrade our software until we've outgrown our infrastructure, which is about a 3.5-4.0 year turnaround for most big companies.
Furthermore, service packs or not, the very WEEK that NBU6.0 was released, we were told we couldn't get any more NBU 5.x client licenses. That's it, no more, thanks for coming out. Suddenly, regardless of bug support, we're left without any legal means of growing without upgrading to 6.0.
That is, in a word, crap.
This isn't a $100 anti-virus package for a PC that's going to be chucked in two years, this is software that runs enterprise installations. We don't spend $5k per client machine for a product that's obsolete almost as soon as we install it.
Now you can say that Symantec doesn't operate like this, that my details are all incorrect. That may be, but that is what we were told by our local sales guys, our regional managers, and the other end of Symantec's international support group.
So on the one hand, we have the model you describe, which is crap. On the other hand, you have the reality that I've described which is rancid festering crap. Add to this the fact that VxVM5.0 Basic (the freebie package) simply doesn't work, and you've got a company that is either too incompetent to survive, or trying very hard to destroy the Veritas products/division they bought a few years ago.
As for you liking your job, that's great. I really am genuinely happy every time I hear about someone enjoying their work, because we spend a lot of time at it. (random aside: Until recently I hated my job although I love my work, so I quit--now I'm working for a better company for less pay, and loving it.) Unfortunately, that doesn't change the fact that your company doesn't even have the vaguest understanding of what enterprise computing is really about.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban