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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
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.
... 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.
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.