Symantec AntiVirus Worm Hole Puts Millions at Risk

May 25, 2006

A gaping security flaw in the latest versions of Symantec's anti-virus software suite could put millions of users at risk of a debilitating worm attack, Internet security experts warned May 25.

Researchers at eEye Digital Security, the company that discovered the flaw, said it could be exploited by remote hackers to take complete control of the target machine "without any user action."

Check http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1967941,00.asp

AND . . . Symantec appears to be using a rootkit feature!!!!

Wow... am I glad I'm on OSX... !

Greetings,



Thanks for the alert.

I love your nom de guerre. After all, spelling isn't exactly rokcet science!

Best regards,

Doug

I changed from Norton AV to AVG, which is free, and as far as I can tell, better. NAV seems to slow the system somewhat, and of course it costs money.

Leif

Another vote for AVG -- I gave up on Norton and McAfee over ayear ago when I noted they both used significant amounts of system resources -- made me leary of what system "holes" they made for themselves.

PATCH!
A fix for the symantec problem has been released:

Click FIX

(and now we wait for the next hole . . . )

I never rated Symantec anyway....fond memories of it letting blaster in on all the pc's I had built for 6 months...cost me a lot of time that one!

Sad thing is they took over Sygate, who did some cracking firewalls...

For low system usage...NOD32 is the best IMO
For free...Avast..

I've been using Symantec's Norton AV for nearly twenty years, mostly with no problems. However, about ten months ago I began getting the dreaded blue screens upon bootup. Microsoft support reported it was caused by a Norton driver and that Symantec had a fix for this error. Well, neither their fix nor their support would work. What did work was uninstall and regedit to remove all references and reinstall NAV. A real pain! But it worked.

Now the new "hole" is discovered. Liveupdate downloaded the fixes and they would not install. The error message was that Liveupdate could not install them because Liveupdate was running. Refer to a Symantec web page for a work around. UNBELIEVABLE. In addition these instructions did not work properly either. It was necessary to uninstall Livepudate and reinstall. The reinstall would not work. After working with five support reps it still could not be installed.

My solution was to install AVG. Simple and error free.

Another vote for AVG.

BTW, AVG is no longer free.

Don't most AV tools use a root kit? Isn't that how they avoid being detected by viruses?

Beachconnection

Sorry for the correction especially as it's my first post
But...

AVG is still free, it's here

http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1


I use Avast - which IMO is slightly better, also free

http://www.avast.com/eng/programs.html