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Chrome Security

Symantec Antivirus Crashed Chrome 78 (zdnet.com) 23

Posted by EditorDavid from the aw-snap dept.
SmartAboutThings tipped us off to an interesting bug reported by ZDNet Thursday: For the fourth time in three months, a Symantec security product is crashing user apps, and this time it's the latest Chrome release, v78, which rolled out earlier this week, on Tuesday, October 22. According to reports on Reddit [1, 2] the Google support forums [1, 2], and in comments on the official Google Chrome blog, Symantec Endpoint Protection 14 is crashing Chrome 78 instances with an "Aw, Snap! Something went wrong while displaying this webpage" error... The errors have been plaguing users for the past two days, with the vast majority of reports coming from enterprise environments, where SEP installs are more prevalent....

According to the antivirus maker, the issues are only affecting SEP 14 users on Windows 10 RS1, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2016 operating systems. Symantec users on other OS versions can fix this by updating to the latest SEP 14.2 release. Users of Microsoft Edge Chromium are also impacted, but the Chromium-based Edge version has not been officially released; hence there are almost no users impacted by this issue in the real world...

Symantec blamed the issue on Microsoft's Code Integrity security feature, which Google uses to protect the Chrome browser process. As a temporary solution, Symantec recommends that users exclude Chrome from receiving protection from their antivirus product, or modify their Chrome clients, so the browser starts without Code Integrity protections. However, this opens the browser to various attacks and is not recommended as long as users can simply use another browser until this is fixed.
ZDNet adds that the issue "should have not surprised Symantec staff, who received early warnings about this more than three months ago, according to a bug report filed in early August while Chrome 78 was still in testing in the Canary channel."
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Symantec Antivirus Crashed Chrome 78 More

Symantec Antivirus Crashed Chrome 78

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  • The cure is worst than the disease (Score:3)

    by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Saturday October 26, 2019 @09:43AM (#59349936)
    Run your browsers in a VM and dispense with bloated AV apps that bog down your system and create more problems than they solve.
    • Norton Utilities and Norton Antivirus were very fine products... when they were under the purview of Peter Norton.

      Immediately after the acquisition of the Norton products by Symantec, many years ago, they started a slow downhill slide in quality.

      I stopped buying Symantec products a long time ago.

      • Norton Utilities and Norton Antivirus were very fine products... when they were under the purview of Peter Norton.

        Okay, but that was just about 30 years ago.

      • I used to work for a different company that was also aquired by Symantec. The work environment instantly turned into an Ellison-esque environment of fear with regular layoffs and a marketing driven organization. One year, big screen monitors turned up in all the hallways spewing marketing videos... the day after a round of unneeded layoffs. A few of us put name tags for the laid off employees on the monitors. And occasionally put cheap DVD players with random stuff like Doctor Strangelove" on them instead o

        • The work environment instantly turned into an Ellison-esque environment of fear with regular layoffs and a marketing driven organization.

          Larry Ellison or Harlan Ellison?

    • Something like Sandboxie would probably be sufficient, a VM seems like overkill to me. I feel like anything advanced enough to break a sandboxing program is probably also going to be advanced enough to detect when it's in a VM and try to escape.

  • Sounds like SAV is actually working correctly if it's detecting Chrome as malware.

  • The company is split up and sold off, with a lot of the top talent already flown and working elsewhere. This sort of outcome is to be expected, particularly in the short term, which is now.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • ... crash Facebook?

  • Stop using the garbage anti-virus products put out by Symantec/Norton and switch to an anti-virus product that doesn't suck.

  • Sounds like Symantec got caught doing some dodgy stuff (manipulation of a running executable), and got caught by the protections in place to stop just such dodgy behaviour.

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