Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus | Hacker News Reader

Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus

tech.blorge.com

6 pointsvaksel21 comments

Standard executive talk. He's oblivious to the fact that many of the free offerings have higher detection rates than his companies products while at the same time have a much smaller footprint than any product they will ever make.

Higher detection rates is not better. Higher detection rates just means more false positives. This is a very bad thing for small companies releasing desktop software.

Plus, have you used Symantec Endpoint Protection? It uses 8 megabytes of memory. Tiny.

It uses 6 megabytes of memory

1) That's just the loader; it forks other crap.

2) I wouldn't be surprised if Symantec was hooking the OS API to report smaller footprint or gaming the profiling infrastructure in another way. Crap like that has been going on since the 80s.

You're right, it forks a couple more processes. It comes to a total of 8 megs, not 6. I should've checked that the first time.

Still pretty tiny.

Higher detection rates just means more false positives.

Or better detection of viruses.

Ideally, yes. And that's certainly how companies are marketing their free AVs. The reality is that before we started signing all of our software, the free AVs detected it as a virus.

It's bad for business when you have to defend your product as not a virus (on top of trying to sell it!)

I wrote about it 2 years ago: http://wyday.com/blog/2007/useful-instantupdate-feedback/

> Higher detection rates is not better. Higher detection rates just means more false positives.

Awesome, so the machine I have with NO AV software at all with a detection rate of 0 must be the bestest!

That's obviously not what I meant. Read my comment below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=688388

People test antivirus software by throwing a certain number of virii at it and seeing what percentage of those are detected. This is their detection rate.

Just because Antivirus A detects 99% and Antivirus B detects 85% does not mean users of Antivirus A can expect more false positives. If anything, the better designed software should yield less.

Also: Yes, I have used endpoint protection. It's forced onto my work laptop at the office. It has a tendency to KILL my systems performance randomly, even when not performing a scheduled scan. 8mb of ram, while impressive for a symantec process, is simply an arbitrary number if any type of disk access gets slowed down by the service.

Symantec is in my list of top 4 worst software manufacturers in the world along with Intuit, Hewlett-Packard, and Adobe. I would never -- ever -- trust my computer to Symantec.

Their software is bloated, it's buggy, it believes it owns your computer and it fails at doing what it is supposed to do.

Choose AVC or ClamWin and only download and install software from trusted sources. Disable autoplay.

It's just like the real world, avoid dangerous sources. If you have sex with random people and don't protect yourself, you're more likely to get a biological virus too.

Don't forget to add Norton to that list of crappy companies.

I think Symantec bought Norton.

I'm not a Windows guy and I can't confirm this, but my windoze-guru friends always say one thing to people asking for advices:

don't install Symantec products

Anecdotal, I know, but a few times I've UNinstalled Norton on my father-in-law's machines, replaced with either AVG or Avast, and stopped its incessant HD activity, speeding it up quite a bit.

From what I"ve seen based on the number of customers we have who bring in computers so riddled with viruses that they won't function (about 500 so far this year in a town of 15k people), it's dangerous to rely on Symantec, because about 90% of those computers have Norton anti-virus installed on them. The rest are McAfee or nothing. I've never seen a computer with a free antivirus program like AVG or Avast as badly infected.... not saying it doesn't happen, just that I don't see it. My guess is that a lot of people who know enough to hunt down free antivirus software probably no enough to fix their computer when something does happen.

I would suggest this is partly due to the fact that computer users who know about and install these software packages are more literate in general and therefore more likely to use their computers in ways less likely to be infected.

It seems that the bloated AV products from not just Symantec, but also Norton and McAfee, have a lot in common with the symptoms of malware and viruses

    - Sucks up CPU
    - Sucks up Memory
    - Sucks up Disk Space
    - A Small Performance hit
    - Uses network bandwidth
    - Annoys you to hell with reminders to buy their product
    - Close to impossible to get rid of at times

Norton is part of Symantec. It's just a branding thing for corporate/consumer use.

In other news, Microsoft says Linux is a bad choice.

IIRC ClamAV used to have the quickest response time for adding new viruses to their database. Smells like marketing FUD to me, must mean the free ones are cutting into their market.

I find it funny, especially when Symantec is usually in the bottom half of every antivirus banchmark made, surpassed easily by antivirus like Avira or Avast.

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