Are you saying that David Lipman is liar when he says: "Condsidering how
many posts I constantly see of people indicating problems
with it and its failure to remove malware". David is an experienced
Security Expert (or appears to be one) and he should know what he is
talking about.
No, and David and I communicate every week or so, and I have a great
amount of respect for David, but I also work with clients and their home
computers and friends and such around the USA, and my experience with
masses of people is different. While he's seeing posts in Usenet, and I
agree with his statement, I also see people in the "wild" that have been
protected. Maybe you should look at his AND my statement and determine
where the problem users failed with the product - I just replied in
another group, I pasted it below for your benefit.
In business whether or not customers know anything about the product is
irrelevant. Customers should be given the benefit of doubt. If they
know little about usenets then there wasn't the necessity for them to
research into this. Had they any need for this service, they would have
known from people like you who will go out of their way to educate and
inform these people. NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION!!
I don't want to carry on this topic. I am a satified user of Windows
Defender Beta 2 and that is all matters to me. David Lipman is an
experienced security expert (or appears to be one) and I value his
expertise in such matters. As far as you are concerned, I have no
record of your expertise on any matters except that you like arguing and
to take an opposite view on everything and to waste everybody's time.
I understand you position, I understand that "Some" people have problems
with Norton, I understand that MANY people have problems with NIS (and I
would never use NIS personally or professionally).
The simple fact is that we have unmanaged clients, a couple Sororities,
and I consider these the worst of the worst - they run P2P apps, they
all use outdated IM software, they click on anything that presents
itself, they do all sorts of bad security things...
Every year we clean their workstations/laptops before the can put them
on the house network, we also maintain them during the year.
At the start of the year, the only machines that are close to being
clean are the ones running Norton (or Symantec Corp) or the one we got
this year running Panda. Every computer running any other form of AV had
malware of one type of another. All of the ones running AVG had anywhere
from several to hundreds of malware items - mostly trojans.
During the school year, the only students we get calls from, and we
check monthly too, are the ones running AVG. These infected users have
kept their updates set to once a day, run the weekly test, but still get
compromised.
Now, as to norton still allowing compromise, I'm sure that there are
going to be cases where every av product allows something through that
it should have stopped - in fact, I've seen every AV product mentioned
in this group allow 0-day threats through at least once, but, on a
properly configured machine, with a subscription set to update once a
day, I have never seen a computer running a valid/current norton
compromised by anything other than a 0-day exploit (which puts it in the
class as being as good as everything else in the same situation). As for
known viruses/malware, I've never seen a properly maintained or even a
half-maintained norton installation compromised.
Again, I understand it happens, I know it happens, I know that none of
the systems, and we have clients all over the US (and some outside) and
their home computers, and clients that we consider "in-the-wild", and
family and friends, all running Norton/Symantec AV solutions (not the
suites), and none of them have been compromised.
I stand by this review, as I can't dispute any of their findings:
http://www.av-comparatives.org/seiten/ergebnisse_2006_02.php