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Malwarebytes FREE and PRO/Premium - Mini-Review.
Stoic Joker:
[/b] There is a plant, indigenous to New Zealand, which trampers (people who like roughing it, walking over the mountains) call a "Bush Lawyer", because it has hooks on it so that it clings to your legs/clothes - anything it touches - and is well-nigh impossible to shake off. You learned to avoid the thing like the plague. Norton virus software is like that - only worse. Hooks all over the place. As it was being uninstalled, it kept saying things like "Are you sure?", "Tell us why you are uninstalling this software", and so forth, all the while desperately trying to phone home (in anticipation of which, I had already disconnected the laptop from the Internet).-IainB (May 23, 2014, 10:35 AM)
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The Norton Removal Tool (by Symantec) is the best fix for this that I've found. Their "uninstaller" is only a quickie dust-off that assumes you will reinstall. The Removal Tool OTOH is what's called a scrubber that eradicates every last visage of the software to make sure the system is pristine enough to get a newer version installed - which of course nobody in their right mind is ever foolish enough to do once they finally escape. :)
Most AV suites have a (scrubber level) removal tool, so they are (for me) the automatic goto for getting things cleaned up fast.
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@MilesAhead - That is interesting, as I've never seen the NRT fail. Some of the older ones were a bit finicky about exactly which version of which suite was being removed ... But orphaning a driver? Damn! That's a new one on me. any chance it could have been a bugg masquerading as an AV component?
IainB:
I reckon @MilesAhead is spot-on where he says of Norton:
...It's pure harassment. Preloaded is the only way it would get on any of my machines. ...
-MilesAhead (May 23, 2014, 01:01 PM)
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I have removed Norton AV from the PCs of several friends who did not have the knowledge to do it themselves, and were finding the thing to be an annoying and harassing malware. Without exception, they were all very grateful when I had banished the thing and given them a proper, free and friendly AV product in its stead. Even in the case of the laptop I described above, Norton AV was already entirely superfluous by definition, because the Windows 8 OS comes with Windows Defender, which now incorporates a great Firewall and MS Security Essentials - the latter being a perfectly/very good AV product. In such a context, the act of pre-installing the cuckoo egg of Norton AV is a deliberately corrupt/unethical and misleading/mendacious ripoff, making a victim of the unsuspecting and gullible end-user. Such unacceptable/sharp practice and all the practitioners of same are rightly deserving of being despised.
From experience, I personally would prefer not to touch any Norton product - ever - including their own amusingly and ironically-named Norton Removal Tool.
They seem to have acknowledged by that name that an installed Norton/Symantec product is in itself a kind of virus infection like a rootkit, that necessitates a special removal and clean-up tool. Right. Say no more.
I discovered a few years back that, once your PC had a Norton product installed, it was prudent to treat it like any virus infection, and the only sure way to successfully expunge it was, as @MilesAhead described - i.e., not with the NRT (which might not remove all of the virus, or might in itself present a further threat) but with conventional removal tools - e.g., including RevoUninstaller, CCleaner, and doing a manual Registry search/edit for Norton/Symantec keyword strings. (Having had a good night's sleep, I am about to perform the latter on that new laptop I mentioned above, as the laptop is being blocked from completing the FREE upgrade to Win8.1, and I suspect there may still be some residual Norton hooks that need to be removed - the install presumably can't take place if there is something in the existing system (like Norton AV) which is hostile to or disables something in the Windows OS asset store.
Who knows whether, before long, MBAM might not include Norton software infections in its definition of PUP? Norton infections are certainly hostile to MBAM and MS SE and about as useful and certainly as insidious as Candyware (QED per example above). It's not even a case of caveat emptor, because the majority of unsuspecting and luckless buyers won't have the wherewithal to know that there is a Norton virus infection pre-installed by the OEM install.
You can read discussions in various forums about Norton/Symantec where it seems that not a few people, from experience, have learned to distrust Norton/Symantec products - e.g., this discussion and also see DC Forum discussion thread Norton Identity Safe -- Free Download.
The foregoing shows that there's a reason for this - a Norton product is a virus infection - hijackharassransomware; a PC-bedbug or whatever else you might call it.
dcwul62:
A lot of folks here are against Norton.
Up front: No offence meant... and I respect decisions here, but as for me, I personally I prefer to go for reviews by magazines and websites and
AV-test.
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Malwarebytes FREE and PRO/Premium - Mini-Review.
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Malwarebytes FREE and PRO/Premium - Mini-Review.
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Malwarebytes FREE and PRO/Premium - Mini-Review.
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Seems that Kaspersky is performing slightly better than Norton.
I would have sticked to KIS if their service would be better.
if you have installed KIS on a VM and you delete the VM then 1 license remains active, although in fact it is not used anymore.
or I sell my pc and removed the AV software.
it seems it is difficult for AV-companies to monitor the number of licenses used/active at the same time, meaning to say that I could basically install the software on a number of devices, but only first three (for example) of the license will be protected.
Norton at least allows users to delete a license in such cases, so it can be used for another device.
AFAIK, sofar Kaspersky has no solution for that. They donot reply a support question asking how to proceed in such cases.
Similarly, when asking how to proceed if I wish to upgrade my license from 3-PC to 5-PC, well, they don't care: no reply from Kaspersky support.
Also not on reminders...
Even a separate post asking how long it takes before I may expect a reply remains unreplied.
So, as said, end-users should use the forum, if there is no solution there, bad luck.
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IainB:
@dcwul62: Don't get me wrong, Norton can't be all bad, and I would be the first to agree that most Norton products - such as AV, for example - seemed pretty good at what they did. I wouldn't expect that Norton made any necessarily bad products.
It's just the whole principle of the Norton bedbugware approach (described above) that I object to and that makes me not trust the thing or the company that devised that approach for its business model.
By the way, after I had eradicated Norton/Symantec from this Win8 laptop I am using, I was greatly relieved that the Win8.1 auto-update magically started working, whereas it had previously repeatedly and consistently failed to work with manual starts (Error code: 0x80240031) beyond the 50% download point before.
So the auto-update finally performed the FREE update to Win8.1, like it should have.
Could be a coincidence, I suppose. However, most of the forum discussions on the problem (that I saw) did seem to say that any AV would probably need to be disabled/removed before the update would work. After I removed Norton, MBAM PRO was finally able to be installed just fine and operate in real-time checking mode, and as I hadn't removed Windows Defender, MS SE was able to be enabled (it was blocked from being enabled whilst Norton was installed).
Stoic Joker:
Antivirus software is dead, says security expert at Symantec:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/06/antivirus-software-fails-catch-attacks-security-expert-symantec
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2150743/antivirus-is-dead-says-maker-of-norton-antivirus.html
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/06/symantec_s_vp_for_information_security_brian_dye_says_that_antivirus_is.html
http://news.sky.com/story/1256251/antivirus-is-dead-says-norton-software-boss
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303417104579542140235850578
But hackers increasingly use novel bugs. Symantec's senior vice president for information security estimates antivirus now catches just 45% of cyberattacks. -tl;dr version
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