Norton 360 'anti' virus installs cryptominer

Krenum said:
It absolutely amazes me that anti virus software is still a thing & that people still buy it.
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No one buys it. It is forces in them when they buy a new system. That or McAfee. I have a lower ultra book from.work that has Norton installed on it and honestly don't feel like it is effecting the system much. Maybe the enterprise version is different form the consumer market.
 
Shoganai said:
Windows Defender doesn’t do jack for ransomware, and although you can turn on ransomware protection manually in Windows, it is a huge PITA. Although Defender is way better than it used to be, it’s not quite good enough by itself.

As for Norton, it’s always been a steaming pile. I remember helping someone because their printer wouldn’t print. Turns out Norton kept flagging the print spooler as a virus. Removed Norton and all was well.
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It's good enough. Better than any other commercial solution out there these days, and it's included in Windows. The best way to avoid ransomware is to just not click on everything when you're online. Most people who get taken are those who open the scary looking e-mails and then carelessly clicking on the included links or attachments in them. Hacking is still largely done with social engineering, not techno magic.
 
Honestly, can't remember the last virus I got. Also helps that I stopped going to torrent sites. If you just visit legit websites and don't click emails, there is very little danger of getting infected.
 
cybereality said:
Honestly, can't remember the last virus I got. Also helps that I stopped going to torrent sites. If you just visit legit websites and don't click emails, there is very little danger of getting infected.
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Legit websites are compromised every day....how do you define a website as legit? Plenty of main stream sites got hit through their ad partner networks years ago....things like this happen every day.
 
OutOfPhase said:
Flashback time. Wow, I really don't miss the days where norton disk doctor was something which was actually very useful, because DOS/FAT.
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Norton Utilities was basically a requirement if you had any Macintosh computer in the 90s, along with Macsbug.

Mac OS up until version 9.x was cooperatively multitasked like Windows 9x was. Any single misbehaving bit of software could and often did take down the entire system, resulting in massive disk corruption. Incompatible INITs, control panels and 32 bit dirty applications could also cause massive disk corruption. One example is trying to run the original Dark Castle game on System 7, which will basically wipe the disk clean. It's a pure 24 bit application and has no concept of 32 bit CPUs, resulting in hilarious effects like rolling screen corruption before crashing to a sad mac. Reboot the computer and the boot drive is totally hosed. But even if the OS and applications were behaving, the file system was so temperamental that normal operations could result in corrupt files and directories.

Norton Disk Doctor kept the bailing wire and duct tape of Mac OS from completely falling apart.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Legit websites are compromised every day....how do you define a website as legit? Plenty of main stream sites got hit through their ad partner networks years ago....things like this happen every day.
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Sure, I mean, I still take security precautions. Such as using an ad-blocker and I do run anti-virus. So I have seen attempts, but nothing successful in maybe 10 years.
 
Krenum said:
It absolutely amazes me that anti virus software is still a thing & that people still buy it.
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I haven't paid for it ever.

For many years I was using free versions of AVG or Avira but they quickly went from actually being useful to being spam happy nagware in the extreme which finally convinced me to uninstall them.

But I use Linux as my main OS. I don't even have a browser installed in Windows (other than what Microsoft forces on you) so I am not concerned at all about randomly hitting something bad.

That said, I still think it is a good idea to have some sort of antivirus as part of your layered approach to security even for home computers. No matter how good you think you are at making the correct judgment calls and not clicking on the wrong things, no one is perfect. We all have a bad day (tired, drunk, hungover, whatever) and make mistakes.

If I still used Windows as my daily driver desktop OS and did my browsing in it, I'd likely be looking around for some sort of antivirus software just as an extra safeguard. I'd likely prefer a free one, but they are all obnoxious these days. I'd probably just pay for a personal license to TrendMicro and call it a day. It seems like a good one and is pretty unobtrusive on my work machines.

As it stands, since Windows doesn't get used for anything other than running my Steam client and the games it downloads, I feel pretty safe just running an occasional defender sweep on it. I also have ClamAV installed on my Linux desktop and on my NAS, and have it set up in Cron to do a periodic scan of the NAS just in case.

It seems like a good balance to me.
 
I use BitDefender, I've tried most of the security suites, and I'm pretty sure it is the best. It is paid, but you get what you pay for.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I haven't paid for it ever.

For many years I was using free versions of AVG or Avira but they quickly went from actually being useful to being spam happy nagware in the extreme which finally convinced me to uninstall them.

But I use Linux as my main OS. I don't even have a browser installed in Windows (other than what Microsoft forces on you) so I am not concerned at all about randomly hitting something bad.

That said, I still think it is a good idea to have some sort of antivirus as part of your layered approach to security even for home computers. No matter how good you think you are at making the correct judgment calls and not clicking on the wrong things, no one is perfect. We all have a bad day (tired, drunk, hungover, whatever) and make mistakes.

If I still used Windows as my daily driver desktop OS and did my browsing in it, I'd likely be looking around for some sort of antivirus software just as an extra safeguard. I'd likely prefer a free one, but they are all obnoxious these days. I'd probably just pay for a personal license to TrendMicro and call it a day. It seems like a good one and is pretty unobtrusive on my work machines.

As it stands, since Windows doesn't get used for anything other than running my Steam client and the games it downloads, I feel pretty safe just running an occasional defender sweep on it. I also have ClamAV installed on my Linux desktop and on my NAS, and have it set up in Cron to do a periodic scan of the NAS just in case.

It seems like a good balance to me.
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If I ever get a virus or think that I might have one, I choose the nuclear option. Just format and reload OS. I get that most people even now days don't know how to do that. I always recommend Microsoft Security Essentials which comes with Windows as a bare minimum approach.
 
Krenum said:
If I ever get a virus or think that I might have one, I choose the nuclear option. Just format and reload OS. I get that most people even now days don't know how to do that. I always recommend Microsoft Security Essentials which comes with Windows as a bare minimum approach.
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Microsoft Security Essentials isn't a thing anymore and hasn't been since like Windows 7. Defender has replaced it.
 
Defender is okay. I mean, it's great it comes built in, but it doesn't catch a whole lot of stuff.
 
This is why I have plans to replace my only Windows 10 PC with Linux Mint.

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GSDragoon said:
People still use anti-virus software? They cause more problems than anything else.
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That question is almost always met by a blank stare when I ask it, so I just pretend to act surprised. Most anti-virus software is malware itself by my definition.

sleepeeg3 said:
Haven't used AV software ever, because it ends up slowing down the PC nearly as much as an actual virus. Offline and/or open-source anti-malware programs only thing anyone should use.
Also, who wants to have a program scan and document every file on your computer? Anyone with Windows 10+ non-pro, I guess.
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I always turn Defender off via local Group Policy. Windows has a lot of important security settings that unfortunately nobody ever touches, though a good deal of that involves disabling all the useless/unnecessary/insecure crap — an increasingly tedious task. Windows Defender is in my opinion much better than any of the third-party AV garbage, by which I mean "less bad". And although I'll never use AV software of any kind, I'll concede that the typical user is probably better off with it left enabled, provided that it isn't slowing down or interfering with their applications.

One of the simplest security measures that everyone should apply is the use of a separate standard account for day-to-day activities. That's been Microsoft's own recommended practice since Windows XP. UAC is not a substitute, but is complementary. It amazes me that some people still surf the web or play games while logged in as a member of the Administrators group.

Dan_D said:
Also, I used Norton Ghost for quite some time after that. Separate utility, and I'm not talking about the windows crap but rather the bootable disc utility. It was fantastic
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I used to like PowerQuest DeployCenter/DriveImage for that purpose (before they were purchased by Symantec). You could boot directly from the OS to a virtual floppy image by temporarily altering the MBR, which was very convenient.

Zarathustra[H] said:
I used Ghost for a little bit after that as well, but I quickly switched to Clonezilla, but I don't even use that anymore. These days I just boot from an Ubuntu or Mint live image, resize partitions in Gparted, and make and write images using dd. it winds up just being easier than any special purpose stuff.
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The problem with dd (or any raw copy utility) is that it also copies deleted/unused blocks, which takes longer and wastes space. Sparse files can reduce those issues to some extent but have their own set of problems. If you're cloning Windows partitions from Linux, then maybe look at ntfsclone. It used to exist as part of the standalone ntfsprogs suite of utilities, which was later subsumed by the ntfs-3g project. I haven't used it recently, but it used to work well. Nowadays, I create images with differential updates from Windows during runtime. I still use compressed tarballs for Linux backups.
 
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If this is their new service model I don’t really see the issue. If they’re offering their product and the payment is crypto mining and they made it aware to the customer, what’s the issue? Either pay the full price or pay over time via mining.
 
They should just bundle NH with NAV, atleast the fees would be semi reasonable then :) Funny how most AV still consider mining programs to be trojans and then this happens...
 
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