Symantec Sued For Running Fake "Scareware" Scans

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "James Gross, a resident of Washington State, filed what he intends to be a class action lawsuit against Symantec in a Northern District California court Tuesday, claiming that Symantec defrauds consumers by running fake scans on their machines, with results designed to bully users into upgrading to a paid version of the company's software. 'The scareware does not conduct any actual diagnostic testing on the computer,' the complaint reads. 'Instead, Symantec intentionally designed its scareware to invariably report, in an extremely ominous manner, that harmful errors, privacy risks, and other computer problems exist on the user's PC, regardless of the real condition of the consumer's computer.' Symantec denies those claims, but it has a history of using fear mongering tactics to bump up its sales. A notice it showed in 2010 to users whose subscriptions were ending in 2010 warned that 'cyber-criminals are about to clean out your bank account...Protect yourself now, or beg for mercy.'"

Antivirus?

[SuricouRaven]

We used to use Symantic antivirus at my workplace. Then we had a virus outbreak. Not a cutting-edge virus, just an old USB-stick-infector that symantic was powerless against. Didn't even detect it half the time, and when it did failed to do anything. So we use Sophos now.

Re:Antivirus?

[ledow]

Unfortunately, I can tell you the same story about any AV product out there, from personal experience.

Go to virustotal.com and upload any "known" virus you encounter and see how many big-name AV vendors don't recognise it at all.

Then make yourself a utility that crashes your system or takes over your startup entries, or does exactly what any virus will do and see how it fares against the same tests. I'd be very surprised if *any* of them picked it up, even with "heuristics" turned on.

Re:Who still pays for antivirus?

[RogueyWon]

I'm by no means anti-MS (Windows 7 is the only OS on both of my home PCs these days), but I'd take issue with the blanket statement that "Windows is also secure now a days".

I went through endless fun thanks to the parents just before Christmas. They fell for one of those fake-DHL-shipping-notice spam e-mails (as they were actually expecting a Christmas-related DHL delivery) and, with a single click, landed their (3 month old, Norton-"protected", UAC-enabled) PC with one of the most vicious and persistent pieces of malware I've ever seen. One of those fake-AV-software ransomware jobbies. It disabled Norton, blocked Windows from accessing DVD and USB drives, did a dns redirect so that browsers could only access the ransomware page and all kinds of crap. I've sorted these before by doing a system restore from a backup point in safe-mode, but even though the restore allegedly worked in this case, the malware persisted through it quite happily. Ended up doing a full format and reinstall of Windows.

Now, there are a lot of failures in this story; my parents for clicking the link, Norton for being completely (and predictably) useless and so on. But I still have problems with describing an OS where a single click can land you in that kind of mess as "secure".

Personally, I use AVG, on the grounds that it provides some basic protection and makes my system chug less than most of its rivals. But it's by no means infallible, throws up a depressing number of false positives and the only way to avoid infection does appear to be abject paranoia (which is now my default policy).

Re:Who still pays for antivirus?

[ArsenneLupin]

... would make a potato a good AV solution.

Yes, my pet potato is my best friend and protector. I call him Balthazar...

Re:Who still pays for antivirus?

[CastrTroy]

Well, I guess it all depends on whether or not we want to be running general purpose computers or not. You don't see many people complaining about viruses on the XBox or other game consoles. You don't see people getting viruses on the iPhone/iPad. But then, you can't run whichever program you want on these platforms. You can only run MS (or Apple, or whoever) approved software, unless you take some huge steps to go around the protections. The computer can either be designed to run whatever program the user tells it to run, or it can be made secure so that it only runs signed software. You can't have it both ways. Sadly, I think for this reason, that the majority of the population will go to appliance type computers in the next decade, where the downside is that they can only run signed software from specific markets, but with the upside that they will never get a virus. Those of us who know what we are doing can run general purpose computers, possibly without even having virus scanners, because we are smart enough to not even run the virus in the first place. I have MS Security Essentials, and if it wasn't so lean, I wouldn't run it, because it hasn't detected a single thing in the 2 years I've been using it. Because I know not to download and run crap off the internet.

Re:Antivirus?

[jimicus]

Then make yourself a utility that crashes your system or takes over your startup entries, or does exactly what any virus will do and see how it fares against the same tests. I'd be very surprised if *any* of them picked it up, even with "heuristics" turned on.

Contrariwise, I'm a big fan of scripting away work for efficiency gains - and I've noticed some heuristic scanners have a tendency to block a lot of functionality in many scripts. You're buggered either way.

Their product sucks, but their blog...

[virgnarus]

While I agree Symantec products are awful bloatware that infect many OEM and the PCs of other less educated souls, I do enjoy their malware analysis blog. Being someone who's studying reverse engineering, kernel debugging, and advanced PC troubleshooting (investigating BSODs, hangs, etc.), I enjoy reading about the dissection of malware and their approach in doing so. Indeed, there are many malware analysis blogs out there that offer the same, but I can't see how someone wouldn't appreciate more, regardless of whoever it is that's providing it.

Re:Who still pays for antivirus?

[jackbird]

And how many billable hours is that rebuild, when the customer has actual applications installed that Ninite won't load up (say, a full Autodesk Suite, 10 years of Quickbooks versions side-by-side, originally purchased through downloading, or some horrible niche vertical business management app)?

When a new perfectly serviceable desktop runs $400, you end up incentivizing people to throw infected PCs in the trash or simply not repair infected machines. That's crazy.

Re:Who still pays for antivirus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anon due to modding above.

ESET has, for years, offered a guide to prevent such issues with games. I agree with those who say ESET is "the best" in that it's not only effective but really doesn't bog a system down. I still think the value proposition of MSE is great. Most folks just don't need the customization options ESET offers.

Here's the ESET gaming config PDF. [eset.com]