Tag: Symantec

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Last week I received a message offering a 30% discount on Norton Internet Security 2006. It claimed to be from Symantec, but the email address was at digitalriver.com, and all the links—including the ones that claimed to be at symantec.com—went to bluehornet.com.

Now 5 minutes of research turns up the facts that Symantec does work with Digital River and Digital River owns Blue Hornet. And it did go to the address I used to register Norton Antivirus last year. So it’s probably a legit offer.

But let’s think about this for a minute.

Assuming it’s legit, Symantec—a company that deals in internet security—is deliberately sending out offers via third-party domains, email and web servers. Depending on how security-conscious you are, they are either making their messages look suspicious or training users to ignore warning signs.

Or have you never seen spam offering enormous discounts on Norton products? Which generally turn out to be pirated. And I seem to recall—though I can’t find an article to back it up—that the bootleg copies are often infected themselves, or crippled in some way.

Given how many shady operators are out there, taking advantage of the big guys’ name recognition, you’d think the big guys would at least make some effort to make their own offerings look less, well, shady.

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We finally replaced our 4-year-old Windows Me computer with a new Dell (I’d had enough of building computers a few weeks ago) and it arrived yesterday. Katie had already asked me to upgrade her Mac while she made pizza for an office party. I had planned to finish installing Tiger first, but once you get past a couple of options and the EULA it’s all a matter of waiting for it to finish.

There’s something oddly exhilarating about simultaneously setting up both a Mac and a PC.

Of course I spent the next few hours registering the pre-installed software and updating everything. Run Windows Update. Reboot. Run LiveUpdate for Norton Internet Security. Reboot. Run Office Update (twice). It’s nice that Dell will pre-install stuff for you, but given that the computer is built to order, you’d think they could apply the updates before shipping.

With today’s hostile internet, it would greatly benefit not just new computer owners but the world at large if Microsoft (and Apple and Red Hat, while we’re at it) would take a cue from SuSE and Mandrake and tie their update systems into the setup process.

To Microsoft’s credit, Windows XP setup gives you a chance to turn on automatic updates, and recommends it to the point of “Well, if you really want to turn it off, you can, but you’ll be sorry!” And I’m reasonably certain Windows Firewall was turned on by default (i.e. it’s on now, and I don’t remember turning it on), though Norton supersedes a lot of its functionality. Depending on the default firewall rules, that should mitigate the impact of any worms that happen to pick your IP address before you run Windows Update.

Correction: It seems Windows Firewall wasn’t on as I thought. Norton Personal Firewall kept asking me whether I wanted to disable redundant rules (makes sense) or disable Windows Firewall entirely (I told it no—twice), so I assumed it was running. I hope it was only off because Norton was pre-installed.

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Last month I finally got around to installing antivirus software on the one Windows computer we have at home. While I’ve found Norton Anti-Virus has worked well on my system at work, I ended up choosing McAfee Internet Security Suite for two reasons: (1) unlike Symantec, they don’t use a product activation scheme, and (2) since McAfee bought Deersoft, purchasing a McAfee-related anti-spam product should help fund SpamAssassin development.

Big mistake.

Since installing McAfee, this computer has crashed at least once each time I’ve turned it on (usually with a McAfee dialog box visible). The privacy service adds another login prompt, whether you want it or not. It tends to pop up dialogs when you’re in the middle of, say, running ScanDisk to make sure the system survived the crash McAfee caused five minutes earlier. And, ridiculously, the software and virus definition update runs through Internet Explorer.

By this I don’t mean that it expects you to go to the website and download an installer. That would be inconvenient, but acceptable (since you could choose what web browser to use). No, it pops up a “Check for updates” dialog box which then opens Internet Explorer, goes through a set of redirects until it opens a pop-up that looks like a download manager (but is clearly done using HTML), and then downloads and installs the update.

Now forget any issues you might have with buggy rendering, feature parity, monopoly abuse, antitrust, etc. Just look at IE’s track record on security.

Why would you want a security system to rely on something so notoriously insecure?

Symantec has its own update program that calls out, checks for updates, downloads them and installs. You can run it manually, or you can set it to grab and install virus updates automatically. Nowhere in this whole process does Internet Explorer come into the picture – or if it does, it’s hidden away where the power user won’t see it and say “What the hell do they think they’re doing?”

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