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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.'"
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.