Ye olde Blue Screen of Death is back – this time, a bad Symantec update is to blame Symantec has acknowledged an issue with an update to its Endpoint Protection Client that causes a Windows kernel exception after users this morning came down with a mild case of Blue Screen of Death. A Reg reader who got in touch about the problem confirmed "multiple" businesses running Symantec were getting hit with the BSOD …
> Endpoint Protection Client. Yeah.
The endpoint that can't boot is the endpoint which can't be attacked or compromised. Mission Accomplished.
> This kind of situation is always hilarious - when you're not among the ones affected, that is.
“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” -- Mel Brooks
Who *NEEDS* virus protection? *I* do *NOT*!
I just use Linux or FreeBSD. Works for me.
And practice "safe surfing". You know:
0. don't surf the web logged in with 'administrator' or 'root' privileges. NO excuses, there have been WAY too many security craters exploited by "admin" users in windows doing things online. So suck it up and remove "administrator" from your login, after creating a PURE (local only) login called "god" or whatever that DOES have admin privs, and ONLY USE THAT ONE FOR ADMIN'ing (no web surfing).
1. don't use a micro-shaft browser, Outlook, or anything ELSE that is likely to preview documents inline by invoking them with 'ShellExecute' or one of its API clones
2. use 'noscript' or similar script-control plugins to limit the kinds of scripts that run on YOUR computer
3. if possible, do NOT surf the web using a microsoft OS.
4. *NEVER* read or preview e-mail AS HTML. PLAIN TEXT ONLY. And do us all a favor by not SENDIN with HTML mail, either.
5. Flush often. Caches, too.
6. NEVER DIRECTLY "Open" A FILE YOU DOWNLOADED!!! (especially NOT double-clicking it!) ALWAYS invoke the application that views it and use "file open" from the menu to open the downloaded file. This probably means usin "save as" in the browser and NOT trusting where it put the thing...
and so on. "Safe Surfing".
I was going to sing the Sophos is great tune (It is still far better than Symantec IMHO) bet they have had their issues as well. They have also just sold out to an investment company that has 'vast experience in the security market' guess that means consolidating /removing features that impact its other companies :(
Can anyone recommend a decent AV that doesn't screw up a modern pc? Or maybe the crappy pentium badged dual core with a 5000rpm drive thing that dell was still selling last year?
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I'd recommend using Whatever Win10 already ships with and make rolling data backups instead.
Because, I suspect that antivirus is really creating a distributed database of file-hashes, allowing the TLA's to track files on the users machines and files being moved to other machines, to see who is talking to who and some guessing about what. Some antivirus tools (Avast) also scan incoming and outgoing traffic via a Proxy so ... "They" get to index that also or look for specific words and names.
Adding another antivirus will just increases "Their" attack surface, apart from all the usual fuckups, resource suckage and incompatibilities that always hang around Antivirus products. Stick with the suck you know, IOW.
Yes, it's called Windows Defender. Comes out very highly in the independent tests.
You can add extra condoms if you want that protection, such as Malwarebytes Pro, and others that can just sit on top and watch and pounce like a hawk instead of taking over core functions.
Very likely in "Software Heaven" with Symantec.
Symatec is the Elephants Graveyards of Software: Dying software travels there, are bloated to hundreds of megabytes with GUI's and Application Frameworks, then integrated in the dropped-set-of-Meccano-sense with a couple of similar relics and another Frankenstein is erased to prowl and prey upon the virtual universe!
..Remedy was to uninstall/reinstall on most, as the article said. They would not crash until either Live Update ran, or you tried to bring up the SEP console on some. Made for a 2nd Monday with all the frills, basically. The worst part was fixing all the VMs/Azure stuff we have, and a handful of remote and traveling users.
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I really don't know why people hate on Vista so much, I used it for ages and never had any issues - I even *liked* the fact it always asked me if I wanted to allow 'x' to run/install - it let me know what was actually going on.
Having said that Win7 *was* better, but Vista wasn't the pile of dog-poo everyone makes out, ymmv.
My main reason for hating Vista was that Microsoft and all the hardware manufacturers got together and decided it was a great way to sell more kit... namely by not having drivers for existing kit available. So that nice scanner I had that worked fine in XP and on MacOS, not supported under Vista. It was about that time I ditched Windows for my main machine at home.
Another reason is that whilst I escaped Vista my dad had a PC and a laptop both running it, which meant I had to support them. At one point I needed to copy something from one to the other, but they wheren't interested in talking over the network for some strange reason. In the end I gave up and used a USB drive.
Scanner? VueScan.
http://hamrick.com
These boffins discovered that the majority of scanners back in the day relied on 3 or 4 chips. They reverse engineered the suckers and wrote a driver themselves. Middle finger to Canon, etc...
Windows will shit a brick with the unsigned drivers, you tell it to SOD OFF and accept them. Done. Lifetime license included on the 50 bucks package. Yeah, kinda expensive, but this is FOREVER. They stil exist.
MacOS, Linux, Windows 10.
Not affiliated, this is really good.
I bought this sucker in 2010, and even modern all-in-one Epson printers still work on it.
While hardware manufacturers always loved MS because new Windows versions helped them move new kit, the only way MS could have prevented the issue with the missing drivers was to never change the driver model/keep supporting the old one perpetually (and my guess is that there's a reason that those things change, on all OSes; would MAC OS X and Linux drivers written for their 6-7 year old versions work on the latest ones?).
As for the network issues, maybe it was a Vista problem, but I remember having a Vista machine together with a Windows 2000 machine in my home network and they played along just fine, even sharing the printer that was hooked to the Vista box. On the other hand, I see weird network issues every week, regardless of the OS.
Ahh Windows 98..
I worked in a student computer lab at the time that particular version was around. We were mostly an NT 4 based shop, but we had one scanner that the students needed to use, and for some reason, even though it was arguably a low end professional flat-bed scanner (it cost nearly £1,000), HP never released any NT drivers for it. So, we installed 98 on that machine. Despite the fact the machine was airgapped, had an up to date virus scanner (can't remember which one) and locked down as far as you could lock down Windows 9x (which, admittedly, wasn't far), we, on average, had to re-install it once a week because it had become totally unusable due to infections.
In a home environment, 98 was a good version, especially in it's SE guise, but I personally preferred Windows 2000 when that came out. Much more easily secured that 98 or ME, was fairly robust, and unlike NT 4, actually had good support for Plug and Play.
Until this year when a new job meant I had no choice but to use server 2012. Jesus, what a steaming pile of crap it still is from its piss poor command line to its awful process handling (start a process in cmd.exe - does it appear in task manager? No. It just shows Windows Command Processor. Brilliant. So no way of killing the process without killing the whole dos box if it ignores control-C) to its lack of core dumps if a process terminates unexpectedly and not forgetting the lousy flat UI which has gone backwards in usability to something akin to that of Windows 3.1.
Why does anyone voluntarily use this pigs ear of an OS to develop home grown server software on?
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