Forgive me if I sound like yet another echo in the hall, which I know I probably will...but there are some points where one has to call things as they see it.
Much of my IT experience has been spent with ISPs, some of them fairly large ones. I'm currently a supervisor for one of them, so I get to deal with quite a bit in the way of customer complaints. At home I tinker quite a bit with my computer - install one program, remove another, add and remove some hardware here and there, try another OS - you name it. It's what I do, something I've done for years. I like putting these things to the test because it gives me experience with the software, and hey, part of my job occasionally sees me giving out software recommendations. Like I said, it's what I do; that's all there is to it.
Over the years I've been doing this I've managed to give thousands - probably more, but I haven't exactly been keeping count - of customers recommendations for programs to keep their computers safe. To those of us who've been in the IT field for any length of time, most of the "recommendations" I'm giving out are old-hat common sense suggestions. Of course, the end user probably isn't all that experienced with security, and the majority of those who actually know enough to really be concerned with it usually haven't gotten there until well after the damage is done already. In any event, I dare say that fully one-third of my work winds up being proving to a customer that the reason they're not getting online is related to some sort of virus/malware/firewall issue - and remember: most of my work is at the escalation level, so that means the people the customer talks to that aren't supervisors probably see a lot more in the way of customers with this type of problem.
Of course, once we find the problem, we make recommendations as to what a customer can do to remedy the situation. One of the programs I've always recommended just happens to be Spybot-S&D. I (rather shamefacedly, now) admit that for a while, I was also recommending - yeah, you guessed it - Symantec's products...though one thing I've always been damned careful to note (and maybe this is my saving grace point?) is that even though NAV claimed to check for spyware, customers were always better off getting another program to remove spyware, just in case something is missed. (For that reason, to this day, I still keep Ad-Aware and Spybot installed on my computer.)
Hang on, I'm getting somewhere with this inane babbling.
Back in '04 I had Norton Internet Security installed on my then computer (a 2.07 Athlon running Windows 2000 on 512 MB of RAM)...and man, you wanna talk about "resource hogs"...
I swear, that was probably the most resource-hogging security application I've ever run. To date, it's also the only security software I've ever had installed on any of my computers that's actually caused me to lose internet access - I actually had to disable NIS to get online. That's bad right from the cut.
Another thing: even then the program flagged me as a Spybot user, and of course it threw up its hands in disgust when it saw it. However, in running the two side-by-side for once, not once did Spybot ever cause a problem with Norton. Odd, no?
I mention the installation of NIS because of a disturbing trend I've noticed through my job. That trend is that of all the times I'm likely to tell a customer to call their firewall maker due to their firewall causing an internet connection problem, NIS is the one most likely to blame (read: installed on the customer's computer) - bar none. Maybe it's a configuration problem. Maybe the customer blocked something they didn't mean to. I don't know, but you've gotta wonder...and when one considers the fact that there's gotta be someone making the same mistake with McAfee, with ZoneAlarm, or whatever other firewall you want to name, there's something that doesn't add up...and it doesn't look good for Symantec.
I'm not necessarily posting to praise Spybot or blast Symantec. However, I've always had a grudge against larger companies (probably my own little rebellious streak manifesting), and I've always been a staunch supporter of getting the full truth out there...and seeing a big entity like Symantec beat on the little guy (no offense intended) for what basically amounts to no good reason other than turning a quick profit doesn't sit well with me - and when one considers that I had the devil's own time removing Norton from my computer, along with everything else I've mentioned, we see that not only is there a foot in the land of the dishonest, there's a chair in the land of hypocrites as well. (At least such is my opinion. Whether you decide it's fact or not is, of course, something I leave up to you.)
With that said, I'd love nothing more than for Spybot to call NIS malware and remove it. However, that would probably give Symantec the nudge to try their hand at a defamation/libel lawsuit, and unfortunately, if they do that, they stand a damn good chance of winning. I don't think I need to say that that would potentially spell the death knell for Safer Networking. Detecting a few "harmless files" could also run into the same roadblock. That means - unfortunately for my sadistic streak - the best options of the ones Pepi is suggesting would be option three: keep it clean and do it legally. Beyond that, we all need to band together and tell people "look, there are better programs out there that will do the same job Norton does that probably cost less anyway", and thus make Symantec lose money the old-fashioned way: boycott it and give their potential earnings to the other guys. (At least most of the other ones play nice!)
By the way, for those of us who are curious, I'm running Spybot, Ad-Aware, NOD32, and Comodo behind a Linksys router with a built-in SPI firewall.
I've had more users infected using NIS than any other package.
