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McAfee Uses Web Beacons That Can Be Used To Track Users, Serve Advertising
An anonymous reader writes: A test of seven OEM laptops running Windows has shown consistent privacy and security issues, including an interesting revelation that the McAfee Antivirus running on six of them is using web beacons to serve ads and possibly even track users online. The seven laptops – Lenovo Flex 3, Lenovo G50-80 (UK version), HP Envy, HP Stream x360 (Microsoft Signature Edition), HP Stream (UK version), Acer Aspire F15 (UK version), and Dell Inspiron 14 (Canada version) – have been tested by the security research team of Duo Security by simply sniffing the traffic sent from and to them once they have been taken out of the box, plugged in, and connected to a network.
Unhappy with being merely ineffective, AV products are back to being actively harmful for the user.
prevalent, these "security" apps, companies, whatever, actually straddling the fence, as it were. Ghostery and ABP are but a couple that serve two masters. At present, the only software I trust is uBlock Origin. In the end, I think people will either have to roll their own or there needs to be a public, open source project whereby transparency is the order of business. The Cold War with ad companies and ad blockers has started, and I, for one, will not allow ads on machines I control, either at home or at work.
What I've been thinking is similar to what some of us did when Flash was still prevalent. I symlinked .adobe and .macromedia to /dev/null and by doing this, I was able to view Flash content without the hassle of LSOs/DOM worry. The website thought it was writing to disk and all was well. I'd like to extrapolate this idea out to ads/tracking cookies/beacons/bad Javascript and simply write this nonsense to /dev/null. I believe this is possible, but my programming skills extend to Bash and Perl scripting only.
Any thoughts?
Captcha: Sorcery
And still my friends and relatives wonder why one of the first things I do when I "clean their computer" is delete crap like McAfee, Norton or whatever other third-party AV suckerware is living on their machines.
Are these ads promoting John McAfee's presidential campaign by any chance?
...use McAfee? Wow...
I read "beacons" as "bacon". And went, like, "huh?"
Oh how I truly hate daylight savings time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Inspires a lot of confidence in all those nifty new features of the Intel Skylake CPUs, eh?
At this point, my favorite reply is "Look, it doesn't suck any worse than Windows."
And.. no antivirus, no unexpected updates changing system configuration, no "defective by design" security issues, and on and on.
Linux isn't perfect, but it does 95% of what I need to do, and I have a VirtualBox VM with XP loaded to do the rest. And with Microsoft and friends (like McAffee) shooting themselves in the foot every chance they get, Linux is becoming a better choice every day.
At work, we use Malwarebytes. And the IT guys are fairly savvy, so I'm guessing it's a bit better than the "old guard" AV products.
Who uses that crap?
nothing to see here - move along
This is why you also need to install McAfee Firewall!
at my last 'windows based' job, they also insisted on malware bytes. the admins tended to be clueful there, too. so maybe there's something to it.
at home, though, I refuse to run them. I refuse to run windows7 update and have deinstalled all bad updates.
backup and restore is my new friend. that, and avoiding doing anything online with windows, as much as I can.
antirvir is not useful for techies and its more trouble than its worth.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
And thats why if i buy hardware (phone/laptop/tablet/pc) the very first thing i do is WIPE it. Not uninstall , WIPE !!!! ;)
When I managed my old company network, I used malware bytes also. There's no money to be made destroying your PC, only in controlling it.
I used a host file per machine to block sites and GPOs to lock down the user's temp dirs so no EXEs could be run from there (mostly for the crypto infections.
Other than that, if a person ever got infected, the machine was immediately imaged back to its weekly image. That threat kept people from risky clicks more than anything else.
Responding to a question in a Reddit AMA, the self-described eccentric millionaire said: "McAfee is one of the worst products on the f**king planet."
I just put a tape over my camera. If I were less lazy, I would desolder the camera and the microphone. I have never ever had a use for them anyway.
For now duct tape is good enough.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
At work, I took the liberty of blocking ALL advertising at the firewall level since our Palo Alto firewall has this feature. I saw a dramatic drop in malware. I'm sold on blocking all ads now and I do. Every machine under my charge runs uBlock Origin. At home I also block at the router as well as on local machines. Pure content is a beautiful thing.
Why the fuck would you buy a signature edition laptop and proceed to install Mcafee on it, thereby ruining it completely? One can only be so stupid, right? Right??
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
...who leaves something like McAfee installed on their system is not the type of person who knows or cares about being tracked across the web
Built-in Windows Defender + EMET (latest at all times) + automatic updates = problem solved
Consumer AV products just build the threat intelligence feeds for the enterprise customers to buy. Charging at both ends; what a racket.
HA! Thought they were serious for a minute.
What? What do you mean it's not April 1st?
Recommending Windows Defender is like suggesting someone bare-ball it across the net.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
So...how long before McAfee advertises that it'll protect you against itself?
"New McAfee 10, with Advanced Protection Against McAfee 10!"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
*struggles to close filing cabinet drawer*
So what is the best to use then?
...needs to be given a brain damage assessment.
I recently was setting up a new laptop for a family member. Lenovo (of Superfish fame) bundles McAfee AV, along with a whole bunch of other useless software and a BIOS activated OEM Windows 10 Home license that doesn't support downgrading. One of the first things I did was install Kaspersky (which is my choice these days, imperfect as it is it's the best of a bad lot of choices) and allow it to remove the McAfee malware. Oddly enough I still had to manually disable Defender in services because that cockroach wasn't as easy to squash.
McAfee burned me badly back in 2004 when an innocuous looking "upgrade" decided that it needed to silently delete hundreds of files in Windows system folders on a whole bunch of machines I was partly responsible for administering, more or less randomly, and it took days to fully recover. To this day that still bugs me, and I'd love to piss on John McAfee's face if I had the opportunity.
Nonsense, Windows Defender has a proven track record of catching over 80% of attacks. I mean, sure it fails to deal with literally more than one in every ten known exploits and attack vectors, but why would we start expecting perfection from Microsoft now after all these years?
McAfee is owned by Intel Corporation. Former Intel CEO Paul Otellini bought McAfee for $7.6 billion.
Quote from that New York Times story: "There are no immediate synergies that I can see," said Stacy A. Rasgon, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. "It is a strategic deal, and it is a pretty rich price for a strategic buy."
Ohhh. It's a "strategic deal". Oh, well then, that's okay? Why are writers with no interest or understanding of technology allowed to write stories about technology?
My best guess is that's why Otellini was fired.
Stories about John McAfee, who started the company:
1) Meet the harem of SEVEN women who lived with fugitive software tycoon John McAfee before he fled Belize
2) Bath Salts, Orgies, Murder, and Anti-Virus Software
3) U.S. antivirus legend John McAfee wanted for murder in Belize
McAfee is a "legend"? McAfee software was always undesirable, in my experience.
4) John McAfee: Addict, coder, runaway
Quote from that BBC story: "At the time of the raid, McAfee had begun an affair with a 16-year-old ex-prostitute he had met on Belize Independence Day."
She was an "ex-prostitute"? She was no longer a prostitute?
Another quote: "One night Emshwiller took McAfee's gun. She aimed it at his head, squeezed her eyes shut and pulled the trigger. She missed." John McAfee's response: "All she did was burst my eardrum. I'm deaf in one ear now, but I don't have a bullet in my head. Forgiveness is one of the graces that we have as human beings. Can I be faulted for indulging in it?"
Not-prostitute Emshwiller is quoted as saying, " 'One time before, I held him in the corner and I put a knife at his throat," she says.'
Former Intel CEO Paul Otellini got Intel, a hardware company, involved in that by buying McAfee, a software company. Would you use Intel McAfee software? It seemed to me that buying McAfee damaged Intel's reputation, and continues to damage Intel's reputation.
and not a Prothean beacon.
APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit http://www.bing.com/search?q=%...
* Less power/cpu/ram+ IO use vs. local DNS servers + addons w/ less security issues vs. DNS + routers. Less complex vs firewalls (needing layered filtering drivers - hosts don't + firewalls block less used IP addresses, hosts block more used host-domain names) complimenting 'em. Antivirus = reactive. Hosts = FAR more proactive, blocking infection BEFORE you get it. Gets its data from 10 reputable security community sites.
APK
P.S. - Hosts get you more speed (hardcodes + adblocks) & faster vs. addons, security (vs. bad sites/dns security issues), reliability (vs. downed/poisoned dns), & anonymity (dns requestlogs/trackers) vs. other "so-called -solutions'" w/ what you natively have. Unlike Adblock/UBlock/Ghostery, hosts != blockable by ClarityRay/BlockIQ... apk
The trouble is that software, particularly what you might call "utility" software that does stuff like clean up malware, slightly improve hard-drive performance or whatever, often starts out being marginally useful (or at least harmless) and usually ends up becoming a bloated mess if not outright malware. I've watched quite a few antivirus / anti-malware programs go through this cycle, McAfee being one.
(I'm tempted to say that windows is currently somewhere between the bloat and malware stage, but that might be a bridge too far)