Security threats Toolkit

Story: Symantec's self serving warnings

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Symantec, in my opinion, has never taken the Mac seriously unless it has been self-serving. I was the System Administrator once for a group of Mac's that were in an Windows environment. Symantec was the vendor for anti-virus software for the entire company. I spent over a month dealing with crashing Macs, that were "protected" with Norton that was up-to-date. Yet the problem turned out to be a somewhat older and common virus that was detected by a shareware program from Australia. Symantec promised to include the detection of this virus in an update, but after three months still had not done so. At that point their contract was up for renewal and the company decided, on the basis of this performance to switch its entire contract to a competitor, that had always detected the virus. Countless hours and data were lost due to Symantec's attitude about Mac's. They left an impression that they only sold anti-virus software for the Mac so that they could say they did, and make money off of it. However they seemed very unconcerned about it actually working.

This is evidenced by the fact that soon after OSX came out and the utilities market became more competitive, they essentially abandoned the Mac market rather than improving their Mac software. Now, as you point out, with Windows starting to become a more secure environment, and more interest shown in Mac, they are starting to look for fresh, untapped, markets. What is more obvious than Mac.

They pulled it off once, why not again? After all, history does have a habit of repeating itself and there is money to be made, especially when the source is naive users.

But as I said, Symantec seems to have never taken the Mac seriously before, other than as an income generator. Why should they now? Just how often does a Leopard change its spots?

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