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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.
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.
And thats why if i buy hardware (phone/laptop/tablet/pc) the very first thing i do is WIPE it. Not uninstall , WIPE !!!! ;)
IT comes preinstalled on alot of machines. Its something I remove when de-crapifying any new system.
It is one of the few AV products that runs on Linux, Solaris, and AIX. Not that LPARs or LDOMs will be getting viruses anytime soon, but it is necessary for making the legal eagles happy and checking the "all machines, logical and physical, have AV running on them" box.
It is far easier to just toss McAfee on there than to try to explain or write exceptions to an auditor.
Obviously John has never used Norton's fine products.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Nowadays we just reimage new equipment. We don't even bother removing it. We have vanilla Windows images with the software needed and that's what goes on. The idea of spending any time removing the shit that Toshiba, Lenovo and the rest of them throw on the computers is a useful activity is long gone now.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.