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

Re:Who still pays for antivirus?

[JosKarith]

I have as a test put an unprotected Windows box on the 'net to see what happened. Usually it's about 1/2 hr before it's port scanned and an hour before it's been rooted. That's it - that's your window of security.

Re:Who still pays for antivirus?

[Dog-Cow]

So basically, you never caught anything worth worrying over, and you're OK with that. This attitude is what gives Geek Squad a (deservedly) bad name.