Posts by drsolly 10 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Nov 2014
"Because this was a new strain, VESKs antivirus provider Sophos had not yet been updated to detect it - something other antivirus providers were also yet to do."
Antivirus was great against viruses. But that's not the threat now. The threat is malware sent by email, or in malvertising. If you take one of the malware-carrying emails (I get hundreds each week) and show it to virustotal.com, then typically the malware might be detected by 10% of products.
You should not rely on antivirus to protect you from non-virus types of malware.
You got a graphics designer in, didn't you. You've been designered, I can tell. By someone who thinks that all computers are exactly the same as his, with the same screen pixel counts, by someone who doesn't care whether an already-read article looks almost the same as one they haven't read, and who is so sure of their skills, that they didn't suggest allowing "Register-classic" as an alternative.
The only cure for being designered, is to fire the designer.
The reporter was from PC Business World. I remember it well; as I recollect there were 11 viruses on that diskette. And the Symantec excuse was, "Well, those are European viruses". And we all fell about laughing, because, hey, guess what, this is Europe. No, it wasn't a non-working pre-release version, it was a working version. Well, sort of.
The reason I remember it so well, is that Symantec spent £250,000 on the launch of Norton AV, and after the headline in PCBW of "Norton fails", they unlaunched it. But the distributors had everytning set up for pushing it out to dealers, and needed an AV.
So along came Dr Solomon's with a product that actually worked (and in those days, it was possible to write an AV that worked) and we replaced the NAV product in the launch with ours, and that's what got DSAV into the distribution channel. And so that £250,000 ended benefiting us, not Symantec.
I haven't run an antivirus for about 20 years, mostly because I use Linux, partly because the threat today isn't viruses.
drsolly
The reporter was from PC Business World. I remember it well; as I recollect there were 11 viruses on that diskette. And the Symantec excuse was, "Well, those are European viruses". And we all fell about laughing, because, hey, guess what, this is Europe. No, it wasn't a non-working pre-release version, it was a working version. Well, sort of.
The reason I remember it so well, is that Symantec spent £250,000 on the launch of Norton AV, and after the headline in PCBW of "Norton fails", they unlaunched it. But the distributors had everytning set up for pushing it out to dealers, and needed an AV.
So along came Dr Solomon's with a product that actually worked (and in those days, it was possible to write an AV that worked) and we replaced the product in the launch with ours, and that's what got DSAV into the distribution channel. And so that £250,000 ended benefiting us, not Symantec.
I haven't run an antivirus for about 20 years, mostly because I use Linux, partly because the threat today isn't viruses.
drsolly
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