Is Your Antivirus Made By the Chinese Government?

guanxi writes "Huawei, a large Chinese telecom and IT company with close ties to the Chinese military has faced obstacles doing business in other countries, because governments are concerned about giving them access to critical infrastructure. Huawei Symantec is a joint venture with one of the world's largest IT security companies which sells security products in the US. Would the Chinese or other governments take the opportunity to create back doors into western IT networks? Wouldn't they be crazy not to?"

Comments

We'd never do such a thing

[tomalpha]

Would the Chinese or other governments take the opportunity to create back doors into western IT networks? Wouldn't they be crazy not to?

Would the US or other Western governments take the opportunity to create back doors into Chinese IT networks? Wouldn't they be crazy not to?

Re:We'd never do such a thing

[jimicus]

Certainly used to be the case that Symantec Enterprise AV wasn't too bad. Small footprint, didn't hog system resources, didn't clutter up the desktop with pointless "I'm still here! Aren't I wonderful!" alerts.

Too much, in fact. As a sysadmin I regularly had people ask me to install AV or (in one or two cases) go out and install a third-party AV product, thinking I'd shipped them a PC with no AV.

Re:We'd never do such a thing

[Moryath]

Antivirus programs are an important part of any sytem to protect you against virus infection. They work well against almost every virus.*

*-more than a week old
*-that hasn't already infected the system
*-that doesn't exploit something in the system running lower level than the AV program
*-that doesn't exploit some hole in the code of the AV program itself
*-that doesn't successfully evade detection just-long-enough to shut down the AV program from behind
*-that doesn't successfully exploit people via social engineering and scareware tactics