Antivirus 2009 security problem

These software issues, combined with logistical and political problems in the antivirus industry itself, are making users less secure. In March, a mishap in free and paid enterprise versions of Panda Antivirus flagged core program files as malware, in turn prompting the removal of files from System32, leaving computers inoperable if rebooted.

Affected systems often lost their networking capabilities, leading to the helpful response from Panda to not reboot systems as they deployed an update to fix the issue A variety of issues have been identified in Comodo Antivirus this year, again from the work of Tavis Ormandy and team. Among these was the bundled program "GeekBuddy" which installs and starts a poorly protected VNC server. This disclosure is actually the "fixed" version of this program, as disclosures made in noted that the VNC server had no password at all.

On the topic of passwords, Ormandy discovered a vulnerability in Trend Micro Antivirus in which the bundled password manager launches a local web server that listens for API commands from the internet, without a whitelist or same origin policy--effectively allowing remote code execution.

In a message to Trend Micro, Ormandy stated that "Anyone on the internet can steal all of your passwords completely silently, as well as execute arbitrary code with zero user interaction.

I really hope the gravity of this is clear to you, because I'm astonished about this. In December , users of AVG products had the "AVG Web TuneUp" Chrome extension forced upon them , in an labyrinthine and indirect installation process apparently aimed at bypassing malware checks in the Chrome extension API, for the purpose of modifying search settings and the new tab page.

To take advantage of the free offerings, Symantec encourages users to use its One Click Solutions self-diagnosis tools first; that's understandable since common problems can be self-remedied. In our tests, however, after answering no to "Does this resolve your problem? Only after supplying a first name, last name, e-mail address, and phone information you previously gave when setting up your Norton Account; why the two can't be linked is unclear are you offered a help ticket along with an option for a free online chat, free technical support phone number, or an e-mail address.

Once contacted, a technician may remotely control your PC while you watch them solve your given problem. Our first encounter with Symantec's technical support ended in frustration.

These premium services are also mentioned when you call for technical support. But in subsequent testing, we found neither the call nor the chat technician tried to steer us toward these premium solutions. Of course, that depends on what specific problem you have and which technician you get.

The Norton in-program Help is better than in past years. Within the Help file, more terms are explained and less jargon is used this year, but it's still not as thorough as other Help documents we've seen in competing products.

And user options when changing configuration settings, long the bane of this reviewer, are once again not adequately presented to the end user: you still have to trust Symantec's opinion on many things. And the online manual, although indexed, is not very comprehensive, and leans heavily toward installation and the creation of the Recovery Disk. Only by accessing the Symantec Web site do you see the free community forums.

That's a mistake. Despite the company response that the Norton community forum is still in beta, these open communities provide more technical support than the canned responses offered through Symantec's One Click Solutions process. Conclusion Norton AntiVirus hits all the right performance notes and its award-winning protection technologies should start to win back even jaded anti-Symantec folks. We love its sleek build, performance speed, and array of quality security tools.

Our only fault remains with the products lackluster online consumer technical support. Robert Vamosi. The Good Norton AntiVirus has a leaner footprint, improved speed, white listing, and other technologies to mark clean files as trusted, and free technical support. Learn about other threats. They then inform the user that they need to pay money to register the software in order to remove these non-existent threats.

Special Note: Reports of Rogue Antivirus programs have been more prevalent as of late. These are programs that generate misleading alerts and false detections in order to convince users to purchase illegitimate security software. Use Microsoft Windows Defender , Microsoft Security Essentials , the Microsoft Safety Scanner , or another up-to-date scanning and removal tool to detect and remove this threat and other unwanted software from your computer.

What to do now Use Microsoft Windows Defender , Microsoft Security Essentials , the Microsoft Safety Scanner , or another up-to-date scanning and removal tool to detect and remove this threat and other unwanted software from your computer. When installed, the following file folders are created:. The installer creates the following files:. The following modifications are made to the registry for example :. Note: "4dc56b38f9c11ecdd66ff8daab82b: is variable and changes from variant to variant.

When run, the malware performs a fake scan of the system, and falsely claims that a number of files on the system are infected with malware.

When you buy through our links, we may get a commission. Despite winning our Editors' Choice award two years in a row, Kaspersky Anti-Virus did not impress us enough to extend that run another year. Granted, there are significant improvements to the anti-malicious-software engine in KAV ; it is faster, although we only saw evidence of that during the file scan test. In our application and boot tests, the numbers were actually worse than last year.

This highlights our dilemma. The problem with KAV is not so much with malicious software detection it does that very well , but with the execution of the overall program. Our installation process required a few too many reboots, and we also experienced more than the usual system glitches on our Windows XP test machines from code we were told was final and already being sold in parts of Europe.

The interface is a little clunky, and messages regarding updates and scans are very unclear. Some of the new features didn't seem to be fully developed. For a world-class software vendor, we expect better. Kaspersky technical support, we were told, offers a tool--avg8. Once we removed these, we needed to reboot and restart our installation.

Shouldn't KAV be accepted by Windows? When we tried to register with the product code--which we copy and pasted--we were unable to do so. We kept getting a message that only manually entered numbers and Latin characters would be accepted. Kaspersky representatives said the latter scenario should not have happened, but it did.

Customers who order online will get a file that you can point to during installation. Then, once the program was installed, we had to reboot. Two reboots of the computer and 20 minutes later, we were up and running.