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Thread: Question

  1. #1
    Junior Member
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    Question

    Does anyone know of any weakness in the Norton Antivirus 2002 or their firewall? Holla

  2. #2
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    Cool

    Why do you want to know?
    For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
    (Romans 6:23, WEB)

  3. #3
    Priapistic Monk KorpDeath's Avatar
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    Besides them being developed by Norton??
    Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
    - Samuel Johnson

  4. #4
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    I know of a weakness in nortan anti-virus all versions actually all anti-virus software.
    If its new you arent protected.

    For further information do some research i recomend www.google.com
    Violence breeds violence
    we need a world court
    not a republican with his hands covered in oil and military hardware lecturing us on world security!

  5. #5
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    The largest weakness I've seen in any antivirus software is'nt really due to the software, its due to poor use. Pretty much every AV suite out there now offers an automagic update utility (norton has its liveupdate) which is nice, however most people set it to default (twice a month with norton) and all of a sudden theyre "up to date!!".....

    This is a false sense of security on the user/admin's part, if you update on the 15th and the 28th..... and an outbreak of a new virus appears on the 22nd.... unless norton was slick enough to tell the future and come up with an update days ahead (yeah.. uh this doesnt happen guys) your pretty much unprotected. Or left scrambling for an update (which of course can be a pain in the ass during an outbreak that gets media attention, nortons servers can only handle sooo much load ya know).

    I've seen many an admin place too much reliance on auto-updates (well duh, it makes life soooo much easier) and spend little if any time proactively updating and researching his systems. Best bet is to keep the auto updates on, but establish a good habit of running updates in between. Most of the networks I support are running norton enterprise, which does take care of the client update rollouts for me, so I simply run an update on the servers every morning. (kinda inhibiting at first, but once you develop the habit it just becomes routine... pretty simple). The other problem is reliance on a single package, I prefer to have more than one line of defense, look into a good AV suite for your mailserver, and establish a good proactive "safe pc" policy. Keep your users in check!!!
    ~THEJRC~
    I\'ll preach my pessimism right out loud to anyone that listens!
    I\'m not afraid to be alive.... I\'m afraid to be alone.

  6. #6
    Hi mom!
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    In Symantec's defense: I'm using Norton Anti Virus 2002, and I seem to receiving new virus definitions the minute they come out, sometimes two, three times a week. I checked just now, and I am using virus definitions of march 21st (today is 24th). I ran liveupdate, and there were no updates pending. Just to make absolutely sure, I checked my settings for updating - they were all on 'default' or 'recommended.'
    I wish to express my gratitude to the people of Italy. Thank you for inventing pizza.

  7. #7
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    "I could not possably have a Virus in my puter.. I had "them" put in Nortons when I bought the puter.. 3 Years ago... Nortons is the best.. My Son the plumber is a puter Xpert.he told me so... ".... How many times do we hear this cry? and in the one breath..
    [gloworange]the original Und3rtak3r [/gloworange]


  8. #8
    PHP/PostgreSQL guy
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    :: "My son the plumber..." That's pretty good. Yeah, it seems as if people see the antivirus "working" (icon in tray), it's all taken care of, when in reality, they haven't updated in X number of days/weeks/months. My parents are a glaring example of that. I put together a box for them with NAV 2001 last year and when I went home this year, it hadn't been updated once (mom somehow disabled auto-update?!).

    5 minutes of education...just 5 lousy minutes...
    We the willing, led by the unknowing, have been doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much with so little for so long that we are now qualified to do just about anything with almost nothing.

  9. #9
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    i completely agree with THEJRC. most virus scanners do just what they are supposed to do. they will scan and compare against the virus signatures and attempt to quarantine or delete a file if a possible infection is found. a virus scanner can do no more, no less. it is the users responsiblity, or the admins if it is a network, to make sure that the virus updates are actually up-to-date! otherwise, they serve no purpose other than to provide a fake sense of security. so many people think they are immune to virri simply because they have an antivirus client installed in their system, then are so shocked and dismayed when they find out they are infected a month latter when they actually bother to update and scan.
    here at work i have been teaming up with to get a managed norton server in action. all virus updates and scans are now centrallized from two dedicated servers. it pushes down the latest updates on every machine and runs the scans for the users. we have it set for 11:15 everyday. that way most users are at lunch and will not have their work interrupted. the scans take place in the backgrounb but it still uses up resources. on older machines, you really know it is scanning.
    as far as personal firewalls go, once again, it is up to the user to stay informed of what protocols should be allowed and what ports should be blocked. in my opinion, it is always a better option to have a dedicated system running a form of *nix to act as your external firewall instead of piece of software running locally. but i suppose it is better than no firewall all together.

  10. #10
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    it should also be pointed out that

    Virus definitions are normally posted to the LiveUpdate servers one time each week , while daily definitions are made available for (optional) manual download using the Intelligent Updater on a daily (Monday to Friday) basis.
    http://service2.symantec.com/SUPPORT...02021908382713


    i always manually dl the intelligent updater files when there's a new epidemic...cause i really don't want to wait until liveupdate gets around to having the most current defs...

    http://www.sarc.com/avcenter/download/pages/US-N95.html

    notice it's not liveCurrentupdate...
    I used to be With IT. But then they changed what IT was. Now what I'm with isn't IT, and what's IT seems scary and weird." - Abe Simpson

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