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.'"

Comments

Who still pays for antivirus?

[DCTech]

There are perfectly good free antivirus programs now, if you want to run one. Most of them are actually better than the non-free antivirus programs. Microsoft Security Essentials is a free antivirus that is many times better than Symantec's and others. On top of that it is lightweight and fast, compared to the bloated crap that Norton is. It works on slower machines too, detects more viruses and doesn't break stuff.

On 8 June 2011, PC Advisor listed Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 in its article Five of the Best Free Security Suites, which included Avast! 6 Free Edition, Comodo Antivirus 5.4, AVG Antivirus 2011 and BitDefender Total Security 2012 Beta.

So choose from those. Personally I don't run any antivirus as I don't download random executables from the internet nor surf to random porn sites or download from torrent sites. Windows is also secure now a days, and I haven't had a single malware in like 10 years.

Re:Who still pays for antivirus?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Personally I don't run any antivirus... ...and I haven't had a single malware in like 10 years"

How can you know that for sure?

Re:Who still pays for antivirus?

[kvvbassboy]

But MSE is the best free antivirus software.

Re:Who still pays for antivirus?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to "willingly" download applications/.exe's to get malware, trojans, etc. There's a lot more out there then you think....

Re:Who still pays for antivirus?

[Joce640k]

I haven't had a single malware in like 10 years.

How do you know? It's not like they pop up a window to let you know if the installation was successful.

Re:Who still pays for antivirus?

[L4t3r4lu5]

I've found that Microsoft Security Essentials is no better than ESET NOD32 for anti-virus protection.

Then again, against anything but zero-day exploits, a properly configured OS and good browsing practices would make a potato a good AV solution.

Re:Who still pays for antivirus?

[RogueyWon]

No, I think there's a problem with an OS that allows for that degree of fundamental OS modification on the basis of a single click with no user confirmation prompts and no recovery path.

Re:Who still pays for antivirus?

[tnk1]

Why would MS work to put AV companies out of business? The reason for MSE is plain: they're embarrassed about the (deserved) reputation of their past OSes in terms of security and needed to address it. These bloated AV programs like Symantec's suite were also bogging down the systems of people who use Windows, which makes Windows seem slow as well. In the end, it was a smart move to get in there and provide an AV that was both useful and mostly unobtrusive. This isn't the browser wars where MS was working to elbow out Netscape in a new area of software; AV companies have had years to make money and get it right and have instead written an expensive, and bloated product in almost all cases.