** Reply to message from Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> on Mon, 24 Nov 2003 13:29:57 -0500 (EST)
On Mon, 24 Nov 2003, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
Most if not all computers that are sold (branded ones at least) do come with an antivirus + "personal firewall" (aka snake oil firewall, as vernon schryver keeps saying on news.admin.net-abuse.email and elsewhere) package, with 6 months to a year of free updates.
If most if not all computers that are sold include antivirus + personal firewalls, who is selling all the computers being infected with worms, virus, malware?
You know that the best AV program in the world isn't going to amount to a hill of beans if the user doesn't 1. download updates, 2. run the occasional scan [1], and 3. pay for more updates past the 1 year mark (for those for which this is a requirement). Firewalls at least tend to be a bit more hands off... and I'd like to hear more about the "snake oil" parts. Doesn't the 1/2wall that XP ships with default to "disabled?" As for Malware... right now neither firewalls nor AV programs seem to stop it's installation. Personally I wish that there was something that we could install on customer machines that would absolutely and totally block the installation of net.net stuff, to the point of deleting any installation files that have been downloaded. [1] When cleaning a customer's Nachi infected machine, I discovered that the installed copy of NAV was completely up to date - but a system scan hadn't been run since July 2002. -- Jeff Shultz Loose nut behind the wheel.