China: Our approved vendor list – Kaspersky, Symantec are not on it Security firms Kaspersky Labs and Symantec appear to have both been booted off China’s list of approved vendors for government agencies. This development comes as the country continues to tighten up against foreign tech firms in the wake of the NSA surveillance revelations. The People’s Daily reported first in a tweet that …
If you're going to hide a filesnarfing rootkit, then an anti-virus product is pretty much the ideal place to put it. It gets installed on every machine, scans every file nightly, is allowed to install kernel mode drivers, and needs holes punched in the firewall to let it download updates.
So yeah. What does China know about those two firms, the NSA, and national security letters, that we don't?
> "So yeah. What does China know about those two firms, the NSA, and national security letters, that we don't?"
To be honest, they don't need to know any more than we do. I wouldn't consider either of them for future use. Having just come off of a years subscription to Kaspersky we opted to pay 3x more for Sophos just to get something that we knew would work.
Kaspersky (v10) provably caused over 75% of the support issues in our environment and while it was a third of the price of Sophos it wasn't worth even that much. Frankly, based on my experience I wouldn't use it if it were free- it slows the computers down massively and parts of the program randomly malfunction even when disabled (ie; the network attack blocker blocking print servers; i'm looking at you!)
That wasn't the worst part. I could live with computers being ground to a halt if it caught the viruses. Sadly however, it failed in this fairly important aspect, and was thus totally useless.
Symantec wasn't quite that bad when I used it like 5 years ago, but to be fair it could have improved since.
"Kaspersky Labs and Symantec have both been booted off China’s list of approved security vendors..."
I booted Symantec off *my* personal list of approved security vendors in about mid-2008. At that point, the dark clouds of IT doom parted, the brilliant sunshine of PC stability joy poured forth from the heavens, and my life has been significantly improved.
Kaspersky always struck me as raving loons, perhaps due to their drooling lunatic fanboi network. They were never on my approved list.
AVG was okay for a while. But they're gone too.
A bit of MSSE should be enough for anyone. Life is *much* better without any of these aftermarket coder drones ruining your PC. It's hard enough keeping MS in line, no need for all the IT Class of 2013 'C' Students to have a go at it.
"China has never been particularly chuffed about the allegations but it is even less amused these days after former-NSA-operative-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the US's data snooping."
Yet then rejects antivirus software well known to be connected with the USA and Russia.
Then, promotes their own malware, erm, antivirus software.
The reality of it is, anyone who has more than an E1 connection is doing it at a national level.
Frankly, the *only* nation I'm aware of that isn't is Somalia. Hell, Libya still is online.
Just get used to it, as I've yet to hear a *realistic* solution to resolve the problem. And to be blunt, I have no solution either.
Got a solution? Shoot it my way, I'll see to it that you're wealthier than the royal family in spades.
I'll settle for three million dollars. One to work for me, one to be riskier invested, one to be "safely" invested.
I'll not expect a realistic reply. :/
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