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Symantec Sued For Running Fake "Scareware" Scans
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "James Gross, a resident of Washington State, filed what he intends to be a class action lawsuit against Symantec in a Northern District California court Tuesday, claiming that Symantec defrauds consumers by running fake scans on their machines, with results designed to bully users into upgrading to a paid version of the company's software. 'The scareware does not conduct any actual diagnostic testing on the computer,' the complaint reads. 'Instead, Symantec intentionally designed its scareware to invariably report, in an extremely ominous manner, that harmful errors, privacy risks, and other computer problems exist on the user's PC, regardless of the real condition of the consumer's computer.' Symantec denies those claims, but it has a history of using fear mongering tactics to bump up its sales. A notice it showed in 2010 to users whose subscriptions were ending in 2010 warned that 'cyber-criminals are about to clean out your bank account...Protect yourself now, or beg for mercy.'"
I'm not exactly pro-MS but DTech is correct. MSE is actually one of the better anti-virus programs for windows these days. You can't fault MS for snapping up a company/product that worked well and then including it for free in their (buggy and insecure) OS. It's at least one thing they did right.
Dude, no, seriously. MSE actually works, and well. From personal experience, I can say that it's faster and more effective than AVG; I've heard from others that they switched to it from Avast, Comodo and Kaspersky.
Everything else Microsoft makes is pretty crap - Windows, Office, IIS, MSN - but apparently even Microsoft crap is better than every other antivirus' crap.
This isn't Symantec AV we all know and love(!) at the heart of these complaints. It's one of those "sooper-registry-optimizer!!11" programs that Symantec apparently offer.
Now, these strike me as somewhat odd. I've been dealing with Windows in one form or another since before the registry even existed - and I've never yet seen one of these tools do the slightest bit of good. Sure, if there's a specific problem (eg. malware) then a specific tool to deal with it may well help - but every single generic registry optimiser I've ever seen seems to be optimised to suck £20-30 from the customer's bank account rather than actually help them in any way.
Do you run your linux box as root? No??? Then why run all your Windows 7 executeables as administrator? Either you secured your parents box, or they were logged in with an administrator account and clicked through the UAC pop up without reading or without understanding.
Even if you're logged in as an administrator, that UAC pop up is the "user confirmation prompt" that you were just screaming about not having. And no recovery path? How do you think you'd recover from an rm -rf if you were logged into your term as root?
The fact of the matter is, there was a failure to secure the computer. Judging by how you described the situation and the support structure, that failure was yours.
Depending on the specific situation you may be violating the EULA for those clients. MSE is only for use in a business with up to 10 PCs. After that you need to use and pay for Forefront.
I'd argue its because Microsoft has access to their own source-code
I doubt that's the real reason, because both Norton and McAfee used to be good. Then they started to be bigger resource hogs than most viruses they were protecting you against (yes there's other evil stuff that viruses do but keep reading...).
I definitely recall Norton/Symantec making systems more unstable or causing problems:
1) Years ago someone had problems fetching email, turns out Norton/Symantec was intercepting the POP3 connections to scan for viruses (ok fine), but some email was causing it to _crash_ (extremely not fine- especially if it turns out to be an exploitable code-injection bug).
2) In 2007: http://www.pcworld.com/article/132050/millions_of_chinese_hit_by_symantec_foulup.html
A virus-signature update delivered automatically to users on Friday about 1:00 a.m. Beijing time to Symantec's antivirus scanning engine mistook two critical system files of the Simplified Chinese edition of Windows XP Service Pack 2 for a Trojan horse. The two files -- netapi32.dll and lsasrv.dll -- were falsely quarantined, which in turn crippled Windows. If an affected PC was rebooted, Windows failed on start-up and showed only a blue screen.
3) On 28 January 2010, Symantec's antivirus software marked Spotify as a Trojan horse, disabling the software across millions of computers
Nowadays depending on the situation I use Avira, MSE or "no antivirus". My personal home machine has no AV installed. My browser runs as a different user process. If I have something that I think is suspicious, I check it with VirusTotal ( https://www.virustotal.com/ ). So far I have had no problems doing things this way, so I don't see the point of constantly incurring the extra CPU/resource costs by installing a real-time virus scanner on my machine. For the past few decades my personal machines have never been infected by a virus. I may have downloaded viruses or malware, but I have not been infected by them. And yes I do know how to check.
A dedicated attacker might be able to put malware on my machine, but they'd know how to use virustotal or similar too, and still be able to plant malware on my machine even if I was running AV software (and wasting resources).
The machine my parents use on the other hand has AV software installed (not Symantec, nor McAfee).
AV software is not needed everywhere and in some cases if installed, it indicates someone is doing something wrong: http://xkcd.com/463/
Given my track record vs Symantec's track record, I would prefer to take the bet that Symantec is more likely to screw up my system than a virus. There have been other antivirus vendors with similar screw ups too.
On a related note, Trend screwed up notoriously - albeit with its antispam product, blocking the letter "p".
For these reasons production servers and other important machines that are well secured and managed should NOT have antivirus software installed.
If they are so poorly managed that the operators are much more likely to screw up than the AV vendors, then sure, install AV, but that means you are doing something wrong.
I'm sorry you got infected. However you are spreading FUD. MSE is, of course, a real time scanner. Anything that is written to the file system is scanned first; just like with other real time scanners. Now, there probably wasn't a definition for the particular nasty you got infected with at the time. Either that, or you turned off real time - which MSE warns you not to do.