Symantec Placebo Protection



  • Symantec Placebo Protection

    Had this screen meet me last week... and i had to manually scrub the registry to clean the damn P.O.S. after that.



  •  I have something similar:There's nothing wrong with it being off?

     



  •  I see no WTF here.

    You have no Symantec products and therefore you have no problems.



  • @Nelle said:

     I see no WTF here.

    You have no Symantec products and therefore you have no problems.

     

    But you are not protected either, even though it claims so. (Unless this was ironic, like "protected from Symantec products" :)



  • @jpa said:

    @Nelle said:

     I see no WTF here.

    You have no Symantec products and therefore you have no problems.

     

    But you are not protected either, even though it claims so. (Unless this was ironic, like "protected from Symantec products" :)

     

    Dude!, I'm gonna attribute your lack of humour to the fact that it is monday morning and you have a hangover. 



  • I totally agree, no symantec products, no self-inflicted problems. Now get a proper antivirus if you need one.

     



  •  

    @Nelle said:

     I see no WTF here.

    You have no Symantec products and therefore you have no problems.

     

    Apparently, "Symantec Endpoint Protection" is a McAfee product that protects your computer from Symantec?

     



  • @Kurgan said:

    I totally agree, no symantec products, no self-inflicted problems. Now get a proper antivirus if you need one.

     

    Dude, just don't run with Administrator privileges. Change your account type to Limited User, and that's it. No more viruses.



  • @alegr said:

    Dude, just don't run with Administrator privileges. Change your account type to Limited User, and that's it. No more viruses.

     

    It could still delete the files in your home dir (sorry, I mean My Documents) though.  Sure, it's a definitely better (no viruses messing with your MBR or wiping the hard drive), but it's not a perfect way to keep away viruses.



  • @burntfuse said:

    @alegr said:

    Dude, just don't run with Administrator privileges. Change your account type to Limited User, and that's it. No more viruses.

     

    It could still delete the files in your home dir (sorry, I mean My Documents) though.  Sure, it's a definitely better (no viruses messing with your MBR or wiping the hard drive), but it's not a perfect way to keep away viruses.

    A virus won't be able to hook itself deep in the OS, that's what matters. And for what it's worth, 7 years of such practice kept me virus-free, with two teen kids and wife sharing the same computer, starting with Windows 2000... One time my son called me at work and was begging me to tell him my Admin password, for he wanted to install a supposedly cheat for a game... Of course, that was a trojan. Had he had admin privileges, the system would get pwned.

     



  • @burntfuse said:

    It could still delete the files in your home dir (sorry, I mean My Documents) though.  Sure, it's a definitely better (no viruses messing with your MBR or wiping the hard drive), but it's not a perfect way to keep away viruses.

    Except most viruses are written like most programs for Windows, they expect you to be Administrator and if you aren't they crash and burn. Although yes, a few a built in a manner that being Administrator doesn't affect their potential damage.



  • @alegr said:

    A virus won't be able to hook itself deep in the OS, that's what matters. And for what it's worth, 7 years of such practice kept me virus-free, with two teen kids and wife sharing the same computer, starting with Windows 2000... One time my son called me at work and was begging me to tell him my Admin password, for he wanted to install a supposedly cheat for a game... Of course, that was a trojan. Had he had admin privileges, the system would get pwned.

     

    I keep the admin password for my brother's/nephew's computer.  A few months ago, they had a little trouble with their cable modem provider.  The nephew (15 yo) calls me asking for the admin password so the cable provider can install something.  In a moment of weakness I give it up*.  What a fuckin' mistake.  Should never have trusted the kid.  Luckily, cleaning it was easy enough by using a USB hard drive connecter.

    * (Yes I understand that normally their should be no software, but I wasn't sure if there was some login software, such as PPoE). 



  • @DogmaBites said:

    * (Yes I understand that normally their should be no software, but I wasn't sure if there was some login software, such as PPoE).
    PPPoE is built-in on XP, so no software is needed.



  • @Lingerance said:

    Except most viruses are written like most programs for Windows, they expect you to be Administrator and if you aren't they crash and burn. Although yes, a few a built in a manner that being Administrator doesn't affect their potential damage.

    What piece of shit applications are you using?  Most should not require you to be Administrator.. 



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Most should not require you to be Administrator.. 
     

    What most should do is completely irrelevant, as I am sure you know. 



  • @Jeff S said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Most should not require you to be Administrator.. 
     

    What most should do is completely irrelevant, as I am sure you know. 

    I dunno; I've seen just a few of such crap. Such as ICQ at that time; I simply eradicated it from my machine. Development tools worked OK under a user privileges.



  • @Jeff S said:

    What most should do is completely irrelevant, as I am sure you know.

    Curse the ambiguity of the English language.  Fine, most user applications will not require Administrator privileges to run.  I've never encountered any of note in the last 8 years of running NT OSes.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @Lingerance said:

    Except most viruses are written like most programs for Windows, they expect you to be Administrator and if you aren't they crash and burn. Although yes, a few a built in a manner that being Administrator doesn't affect their potential damage.

    What piece of shit applications are you using?  Most should not require you to be Administrator.. 

    I'd hint on legacy Win9x software. Windows XP actually had the positive effect of forcing developers to actually make software that didn't depend on Admin privs. though there are some shitty apps that still insist on Admin privs for some really idiotic reasons. Sheesh.


  • @danixdefcon5 said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @Lingerance said:

    Except most viruses are written like most programs for Windows, they expect you to be Administrator and if you aren't they crash and burn. Although yes, a few a built in a manner that being Administrator doesn't affect their potential damage.

    What piece of shit applications are you using?  Most should not require you to be Administrator.. 

    I'd hint on legacy Win9x software. Windows XP actually had the positive effect of forcing developers to actually make software that didn't depend on Admin privs. though there are some shitty apps that still insist on Admin privs for some really idiotic reasons. Sheesh.

    And applications written for a DOS-based OS that has been obsolete for 8 years don't meet the criteria of "shitty"?  They may be necessary to some people, but they are also probably buggy pieces of crap that open up your computer to security holes because of the requirement for Admin privs. 



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    And applications written for a DOS-based OS that has been obsolete for 8 years don't meet the criteria of "shitty"?  They may be necessary to some people, but they are also probably buggy pieces of crap that open up your computer to security holes because of the requirement for Admin privs. 

    Nah, Win9x apps are not all shitty, they're just plain obsolete. By "shitty" I was referring to NT-based apps that still ask Admin privs for all the wrong reasons. I've seen some apps that crash and burn just because the FS is locked down so the user has only write privs on his home dir; yet the program insists on using something like c:\mycrappydata or something like that.

    Fortunately, most Windows apps aren't like that anymore. But there are still some like that, then again, most of 'em are crap.

    And Win9x apps should really, really be put to sleep by now.



  • @danixdefcon5 said:

    Windows XP actually had the positive effect of forcing developers to actually make software that didn't depend on Admin privs.
    XP didn't, only Vista did. And there are still people asking how to install their app to something that's not Program Files when installing on Vista in installer support groups.



  • @alegr said:

    Dude, just don't run with Administrator privileges. Change your account type to Limited User, and that's it. No more viruses.

     

    Eh.  A worm could still toss itself into the local user's startup group/registry and take over MSN, Outlook and so on to send out spam and more worms.  Or fire up a key logger and transmit everything to a scammer or ID thief.

    Limited user accounts won't stop everything bad from happening, especially if you aren't paying attention (and most people aren't).  They just prevent rootkit-like behaviour and provide a (flimsy) guarantee that whatever damage is done can be cleaned up by normal means.  And even if they can't inflict direct damage, such programs can still try to dupe the administrator into compromising the system some other way, as has been done in the UNIX world for decades already.  All it takes is one curious admin, one privilege escalation or buffer overflow attack and the sand is officially out of your little sandbox.

    I advocate limited user accounts too, but I think the only reason they presently work so well on Windows is because the spammers and worm creators know that most users still run with admin privileges and therefore don't care enough to try to be clever.  If every Windows user started running with a restricted account tomorrow, I think it would be only a matter of weeks (if that) before we started seeing a new class of trojans exploiting OS vulnerabilities and other untapped sources of user stupidity.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @Jeff S said:

    What most should do is completely irrelevant, as I am sure you know.

    Curse the ambiguity of the English language.  Fine, most user applications will not require Administrator privileges to run.  I've never encountered any of note in the last 8 years of running NT OSes.

     

    Until a while back (read: vista who nags the user if your app requires admin access) a lot of games required it (sometimes it was just the copy protection). I know of a bank which smartcard software required it untill 4 years ago. [url=http://www.nero.com/eng/downloads-utilities.html]Burning software required it[/url] under 2000 and XP. A lot of programs stored their files in C:/Program Files (The ones that do that usually don't even use the install path registery entry), eDonkey is one that comes to my mind but I'm not certain.

    Most business application probably didn't require it, even 8 years ago, for the simple reason virtually none would have  worked in a office/business environment. A well codec program that doesn't require direct hardware/kernel access shouldn't normally require i. But there were and are a lot of applications that did or do require it, with different levels of necessity. 



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    What piece of shit applications are you using?

    I've discovered that Dell's Network Scan software is for a single user only. It has to be installed as an Administrator and thereafter maintains only one set of settings for the computer as a whole. A normal user cannot ever reconfigure the software at all. The scan destination can only be set as Administrator and if people are going to switch desks, they need a common location to store files as they're not routed to your home directory or anything logical.

    As for anti-virus, I remember running a Web-based F-Secure scan on a PC which was infected. Not an AV sweep, just an "is this PC protected" scan. The F-Secure scan quite assuredly told me that the PC was protected by NOD32, while Windows Security Center had a nice red icon in the tray warning me that NOD32 had expired. If the Security Center can read off NOD32's protection status (i.e. failed) how come F-Secure cannot?

    I was ambivalent about F-Secure at first, but the more I work with it, the more holes I'm finding in it. It's almost worth leaving people to get viruses to punish them for being stupid enough to get viruses, because it's actually very hard to get infected if you take sensible precautions. (For the layman definition of "virus" as real viruses are nearly obsolete.)



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    As for anti-virus, I remember running a Web-based F-Secure scan on a PC which was infected. Not an AV sweep, just an "is this PC protected" scan. The F-Secure scan quite assuredly told me that the PC was protected by NOD32, while Windows Security Center had a nice red icon in the tray warning me that NOD32 had expired. If the Security Center can read off NOD32's protection status (i.e. failed) how come F-Secure cannot?
     

    Because WSC communicates with antivirus software via an API, while a web-based scanner can only detect "There's a NOD32 executable that's not battered with, so it's secure"

    It's a bit hard for online scanner manifacturers to keep track of every antivirus update and built in checks to see if the latest is installed on the computer they scan isn't it?



  • @dtech said:

    Because WSC communicates with antivirus software via an API, while a web-based scanner can only detect "There's a NOD32 executable that's not battered with, so it's secure"

    I honestly don't know what ActiveX is and is not capable of, but I seem to recall that the F-Secure scanner did report that NOD32 was up-to-date. Given what LogMeIn Rescue, Windows Updates and many more ActiveX components are capable of (including installing services), it can't be that hard to have a cosy chat with WSC.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    What piece of shit applications are you using?  Most should not require you to be Administrator.
     

    We run a CRM system that allows for mobile users (like sales reps) to have a subset of the database on their laptops.  There are various bits of software to manage the database synchronization but whenever I call support with a problem, one of the first things they ask is whether the mobile user (e.g. the sales rep) is a local administrator on the laptop.

    I won't name the company, but think "Fulcrum".



  • @upsidedowncreature said:

    think "Fulcrum"

    I hate Pivotal.  We are currently migrating away from their eRelationship product- using Windows Access no less.  This is the stupidest system ever- think of a dumbed down LabView with a tiny subset of controls as far as "programming" goes.  It supports Crystal Reports natively.  I hate Crystal Reports. see here for more on that.  We are moving to MS Dynamics CRM and I now get to use MS SQL Reporting Services!  Life is getting so much better!


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