The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Symantec and Trend grapple with buffer overflow bugs

amanfromMars

Stop everything while we catch up? Yeah, Right on, Bro ..... but No Thanks .... 

Posted Friday 29th February 2008 10:30 GMT

Alien

.....Just Follow the Wakening AIMarkers

"Sys admins are advised to restrict network access to the services pending the availability of patches." ....... which presumably are not presently available. And there was no mention of them being available in the future either. Hmmmm?

Probably very Wise or else they would be forced/expected to deliver something which they do not yet have and may never have.

nico wieland

too bad ... 

Posted Friday 29th February 2008 11:25 GMT

Thumb Down

... that smsme 5.0.6.368 isn't available by either web download or LU.

Mark Allen

Awful Quality 

Posted Friday 29th February 2008 12:01 GMT

Pirate

The lack of quality control in Symantec products now is horrific. Their products get more bloated, and more buggy, and a bigger security risk as the years go on. It's almost better getting a PC infected that using the bloated Symantec products.

My clients are often amazed as to how much faster their PCs run once I remove all of the Symantec Mess that system builders insist on infecting PCs with. Usually replace it with AVG or something similar...

JeffyPooh

www.Symantec-Sucks.blogspot.com 

Posted Friday 29th February 2008 14:01 GMT

Paris Hilton

If you get malware on your PC, then you MIGHT have stability issues and you MIGHT have performance issues. With Symantec Security software installed, you can remove all doubt.

Read it & weep: http://symantec-sucks.blogspot.com/

Steve

Use something else 

Posted Friday 29th February 2008 18:52 GMT

Mark Allen nailed it - exactly!

Anonymous Coward

RE: Awful Quality 

Posted Friday 29th February 2008 18:52 GMT

I don't care much about Symantec, but comparing them to AVG is not a fair comparison.

AV packages are a lot more than scanners nowadays, and if you buy a kit from AVG that contains only various scanners (Malware, Spyware, Rootkit) of course it will be lighter than Symantec, but it will also offer a lot worse protection.

Just having plain scanner solution is not enough nowadays.

1. The most dangerous malware is the one that AV company has not seen yet, and there are more than 500 new cases per day. So AV reaction speed is not what it was.

2. Good part of the modern attacks come from direct exploits, such as drive by downloads or browser plugin attacks. And in those cases scanner based AV warns only when it is too late, if even then.

But that being said, there are a lot better solutions available than Symantec.