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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."
....in my experience modern Symantec products such as Norton Internet Security is the most malicious, but successful form of malware ever. It actually gets people to pay money for the product, and in a lot of cases, pay other people to install it and keep it on their system.
I'm so glad I moved out of software maintenance and into hardware maintentance. Now I just wipe harddrives clean as a whistle and make sure the hardware works. Such a load off!
do() || do_not();
because CNN is infected?
1. Estimates are 100-150 million machines are currently part of botnets
2. Loss estimates exceed 200 billion annually on a global basis
3. Over 80% of all spam comes from botnets
Yes, I can cite. Or you can Google. They are all easy to find.
This is a HUGE problem that is, in many ways, like spam was in 1996 or 1997. The technical community acknowledges it, the average consumer has no clue, and, left unaddressed the problem and associated looses will get much, much worse.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
That's funny...I've got an "always on" setup of Linux Unix, and MacOS X and I've never experienced an issue.
;)
Then again...I did once! It was when I was running Windows 2000. Someone rooted my Hotline Server and deleted all my files
JB
If you'd ever been the person responsible for updating the Symantec Antivirus client, you would not be so quick to judge. LiveUpdate only handles scanning engine updates and virus definitions. Anything else is a huge nightmare.
I don't like Symantec products because they make the life of a sysadmin *more difficult*.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Symantec has seen quite a bit of negative publicity in the past year on slashdot.
I have to wonder how much of it is simply astroturfing by disgruntled former employees? When there's a negative op/ed piece on a "software development and security research" website where none of the SQL even works, I just have to wonder if some no-talent assclown is pissed off because he lost his helpdesk or HR job.
Whenever I have to fix a screwed up PC, MsAfee or Symantec is disabled by the malicious code. So, I always uninstall whatever is on the machine and install something else like AVG or ClamWin.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
... Every machine that comes to me for service has one requirement: No Norton. Take norton off, and people are *amazed* at how much faster their machines run.
I substitute Free-av.com for Norton- better infection detection, less memory overhead, free (with the option of buying a license- I usually guilt them into doing it), and nightly upgrades.
Although they may hold on to the enterprise market, why even bother with Norton AntiVirus or Internet Security when you can get Avast AntiVirus Personal edition for free! http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html/
No, I don't work for them, or own stock. They've even updated it for Vista. The cost? Register for a free serial number every 14 months.
Comodo firewall http://www.comodo.com/ is nice free step up for those who think they need something more than Windows firewall.
In the year 2007, there is really no need for a consumer to pay for a product from Symantec/Norton, McAfee, or any other security software vendor that has been fleecing us for the last several years.
By the same token, I've never seen AVG prevent, or detect an actual virus. I've then removed avg and installed f-prot /or fsecure and watched the virus count run up. But at least avg is free, right? I'm sure it prevents some, but for my parents, it doesn't deal with their weekly virus infection. always YMMV
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Well, somewhere in 1990, Peter Norton sold things to Symantec. They (Symantec) continued to associate themselves with Peter Norton up until 2001 or so. About that time is the consensus that things went downhill. I'm not certain how much involvement Norton had with Symantec up until that point, but I'm willing to speculate that when the two parted companies, that's when Symantec began their transformation into selling the crap they do now.
Gosh, I miss the good ol' days of Norton Utilities and the like...in DOS nonetheless. Now there was a powerful piece of software that was truly easy to use. The UI actually showed you some shred of respect that you knew what you were doing.
The corporate/enterprise versions of symantec and mcafee are great. They scan mail and scan the system and files so they do everything you want from a virus program.
In additon they take up alot less resources then the home versions, and are usally easy to uninstall. Even without the management software you can use them, and they will download info from the web sites of the appropriate company.
We're migrating about 250 TB (no, not GB) from Legato^WEMC Networker to NetBackup because some bean counter made a better deal with Symantec and have so far only found drawbacks to that move. Worst of all, Symantec is requiring us to install full (including X, open office and every single piece of software known to man) Solaris packages if we want support from them...
As a former Symantec Corp customer, I'll disagree with that. The uninstaller for 8 was horrible, and the push install of 9 flat out didn't work for about half of my network (frequently caused by issues with 8). Nothing special about the network either, it just didn't work. In fact, about 1 in 20 network installs didn't work at all for some reason and I had to go install by hand. 9->10 seemed like it was going better until I had several systems start randomly screwing up and causing our EE and ME CAD applications to crash. I was getting sick of all the issues with security between the server and the clients as well as a multitude of other things.
I moved to NOD32, and couldn't be happier. Uses less than half the resources Symantec Corp did, and does a better job. I've had systems come out cleaner using a 3 month old set of definitions with NOD than Symantec Corp. I've got a central management interface that hasn't needed updated in over 6 months because there's been no security holes. Updates happen according to my policies by dropping them in the correct directory if I don't want it to auto-download, although I do just use auto-downloading. I can have one central server per location, then have the server upload it's logs to my central server a few times a day to keep traffic on my VPN links down. It works better and has caused fewer issues. Plain and simple, it's been a better product. Cheaper too!
Everyone who runs as administrator in windows right now would be running as root in linux and then you would see the exact same problems on linux that you do with windows.
That's just asinine.
Windows (barring Vista which won't take major effect for a while and has it's own serious design flaws) runs EVERYTHING as administrator by default.
Linux runs EVERYTHING as a limited user by default.
Most average joe's would be using the *desktop* environment and would log in as a USER, thus protecting themselves from malicious software targetting their system.
Sure, they may lose personal files by running a nasty program someone emailed to them, but at least they won't become a botnet zombie machine that spams my inbox ALL-DAY-LONG.