McAfee website visited by plague of security locusts

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I'd be a sight more impressed by McAfee #

Posted Wednesday 6th May 2009 00:15 GMT

If my sodding machine didn't slow to a bloody crawl every morning, with McAfee applications taking dirty great gobbets of PCU time.

Fscking thing.

Paris 'cos it's give me something to do while I'm waiting*

*And I McAfee takes one helluva lot longer than 30 seconds

Goat Jam

McAfee #

Posted Wednesday 6th May 2009 03:54 GMT

Are they still around? Or are we talking about that 'orrible place where you can buy McCoffee and McMuffins etc?

Either way I reckon they're both pretty McCrappy.

Mines the one with the Jaunty Jackalope in the pocket, ta.

Jodo Kast

McAfee has failed at security? #

Posted Wednesday 6th May 2009 09:18 GMT

Ditch 'em!

There is no need to support 'corporate welfare'. Clearly they cannot be trusted to take care of security (as their business attests is their mission).

I hope everyone sees this as an irresponsible action on McAfee's part, and they go out of business. After all, what good are they?

In reality: they are a business trying to make money; they probably laid off most of their staff and now they are up the creek. Greed trumps security.

Anonymous Coward

Fluffykins #

Posted Wednesday 6th May 2009 09:18 GMT

You beat me to it. Frickin McAfee not only insists on monopolising the CPU but also takes massive gobs of bandwidth when performing updates and manages to take forever to do it.

Even in the background when not updating it's still chomping away. Combine that with seemingly randomly scheduled scans that even if you switch them to manual insist on stopping whichever application you are using by popping up windows every hour demanding that you run a scan.

Then when it does scan it successfully manages to miss most malicious software.

The application ladies and gentlemen is an unmitigated piece of shit.

Of course it's closely followed by apple updates which seem to think that having Safari is so important that it should interrupt any running application by demanding that you download it.

Anonymous Coward

Crap products #

Posted Wednesday 6th May 2009 09:18 GMT

McAfee AV uses a cookie and an ActiveX control to download updates. The program regularly fails to see an installation of Virus scan.

McAfee is crap.

Dr Patrick J R Harkin

CPU hogging #

Posted Wednesday 6th May 2009 10:32 GMT

McAfee does slow startup - which is something I do once a day. Once the machine is running, I never know it's there. As I type this, not a single McSfee element is managing to get off 0% in Task Manager. I run my scheduled scans overnight, and leave my machine on once in a while. It isn't perfect - sometimes the updates choke for a few days, but it has never caused me any real problems.

And yet I read loads of "McAfee is a CPU hog" messages - how come?

Anonymous Coward

ermz... #

Posted Wednesday 6th May 2009 12:02 GMT

McAfee Secure, after all, is designed to pinpoint precisely these types of vulnerabilities.

-------------------

Yes, it does pinpoint them and then gives a lovely report which you can choose to totally ignore and so long as none of the vulnerabilities are classified at the highest level you still get to display the little "McAfee Secure" logo.

It's almost, but not quite, entirely pointless - however if you need PCI DSS compliance you HAVE to have, at least, an accredited automated auditor; of which McAfee is one.

Which leads to the conclusions that:

1: PCI DSS is a crock of shit

2: McAfee secure is a marketing tool, not a security tool

3: the PCI are in bed with security vendors dreaming up new ways to screw the punters

Like 3D Secure - NONE of this has much to do with actual credit card security and EVERYTHING to do with shifting liability. The PCI couldn't care less how many people are scammed every year just as long as they're not liable for the losses.

Toastan Buttar

I shall say zees only vonce (again) #

Posted Wednesday 6th May 2009 12:02 GMT

You don't need AV on a Windows computer. Ditch McAfee/Norton/AVG/everything else and reclaim your processor's full potential.

http://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis/pages/TOC.aspx

Anonymous Coward

Re CPU Hogging #

Posted Wednesday 6th May 2009 13:45 GMT

McAffee does not always run as scheduled, particularly if you do not leave your PC on. It then decides to run itself on an apparently random occasion, usually when you're using an application that needs a lot of processing power.

The updates also seem to play holy hell. Generally it's the most annoying antivirus application I have ever used.