Symantec Rant

Article


He said various malware groups may be co-operating with each other and becoming more effective — something that the security industry should emulate or risk losing customers who have lost faith in their ability to defend themselves.

"If the whole industry looks bad or is not able to keep up, it will hurt everybody," Nguyen said. "There's got to be some kind of paradigm shift so vendors can keep up with the game."


This is an interesting statement made by a symantic representative. One has to wonder why did you say this ? Do you know something we don't ? You're not worried about fixing the problem forever ,you're worried about simply keeping up.

I took a call at work from a custumer yesterday from a customer on internet explorer 7 , puportedly the safest browser on the market, according to Microsoft.
It was loaded with "add ons" that produced massive pop ups , tracked his movements , the whole nine yards. It was so bloated and slow he could barely surf the internet. We disabled the add ons and went to getfirefox.com and got him a firefox browser, and suddenly he was surfing quickly and there were no pop ups anymore.

Personal experience tells me internet explorer 7 is a malware disaster waiting to happen. I don't know why this is , both Firefox and Opera are able to surf the internet without allowing third party web sites to upload additions to themselves without so much as a warning box to tell you your browser has now been altered for some advertisers benifit and your detriment. Why this is impossible for Microsoft I don't know , but apparently it is. win95 came out in ... 1995 , surprise surprise. It's 2007, 12 years later. This simple issue has not been fixed, and is looking like it will never be fixed. And because of it , if you do any kind of online banking or work from home through a vpn or anything secure at all on internet explorer, you are an idiot. And you can bet your credit card number and any company secrets will soon be stolen.

And symantec's contribution to all of this ? Make up FUD's (Fear, Uncertainty , Distrust) about any alternatives to try and keep you from switching away from IE7. Because quite frankly , if you don't use the IE , you don't need their services, and thats bankruptcy for them.

And if you're on Linux , you're really laughing at them.