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McAfee S-1

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Re: McAfee S-1

#61

Post by SahAssar »

jmnicolas wrote: post #56
nevi-me wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll try what you're suggesting. To give you a feel, one evening in the office when I turned off my laptop; colleagues stood up and asked what loud noise just turned off. From that day, we noticed that our laptops were loud because of the fans. Sometimes the noise blends in because of AC and generally noise office. But the pitch is very high, and it's because CPU @ 60+ because the McAfee web control thing is running…

This kind of noise on a laptop isn't normal. You may benefit from disassembling the laptop, removing any dust you find and reapplying thermal paste on the CPU. There are countless tutorial on YT, even if you don't find your specific laptop model it will be close enough.

I'm pretty sure that any company that mandates Mcafee will not look kindly to their employees disassembling laptops either.

Re: McAfee S-1

#62

Post by SahAssar »

peteretep wrote: post #24
gitgud wrote: post #20

Side-note ; Anti-virus software is ironically quite invasive and can be harmful to your system. They bury themselves deep into the OS and often access undocumented kernel API's which can break the OS. In some cases they [1] betray your privacy in the name of security... I guess it's still popular because it's often part of the bloatware on new PC's and Laptops... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20703699

> I guess it's still popular because It’s still popular because, A) it largely prevents malware, B) some security policies mandate it

> it largely prevents malware

Most antivirus has been shown to open more security holes than it fixes.

> some security policies mandate it

That's only because the people behind those policies think that A is true.

Re: McAfee S-1

#63

Post by Beached »

gruez wrote: post #28
peteretep wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess it's still popular because It’s still popular because, A) it largely prevents malware, B) some security policies mandate it

>A) it largely prevents malware compared to what? nothing at all? nowadays there's windows defender which is free so any antivirus product that doesn't do noticeably better is probably junk.

defender is an antivirus product. and yes AV largely prevents malware compared to nothing. defender is a damn good one, but doesn't meet enterprise needs. central administration and logging are nessecary when managing a fleet of tens of thousands of workstations. AV isn't perfect, partial prevention is more common than people think, partial prevention is also partial infection. I have seen countless incidents that started with their av product catching the malware half way through execution but they never knew because they don't receive central logs.

defender ATP solves some of these issues, but osx and linux capabilities are meh at best, and still very new. (linux at least) so still not ready for most enterprises. third party av exists because enterprises need centralized av across multiple OS that works ok. no one is fooling themselves thinking av prevents all malware, but it prevents a lot, and more importantly allows you to get visibility into your endpoints activities so a human can be alerted to what needs to be investigated further.

just because an av solution doesn't prevent things as much as others, doesn't make it completely useless, many many enterprises knowingly trade prevention and or performance for visibility, and cost, and that's ok.

Re: McAfee S-1

#65

Post by WorldPeas »

_fat_santa wrote: post #60
technion wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to expand on this, the "McAfee SECURE" logo was sold to PathDefender (not TrustedSite) and all those McAfee logos you see on websites aren't operated by McAfee any more.

Every time I find one of those "McAfee SECURE" logos I cringe because they are so tacky. Like please tell me exactly how MacAfee is keeping me safe on this website.

I doubt they even do a proper pentest evaluation, they just say "oh this site looks reputable" and slap it on.

Re: McAfee S-1

#66

Post by WorldPeas »

swiley wrote: post #43
a5withtrrs wrote: post #37

I work in security and let me explain why McAfee products are so commonplace in corporate environments, even when there are vastly better alternatives out there. You want an AV product? Done You want a firewall product? Done You want central management? Done You want SIEM? Done etc etc Are any of their products amazing compared to the alternatives? No! Do they integrate seamlessly with each other? No! Are they cheape…

I worked at a large American defense (blob? I don't know what the correct business term is) that put every damn McAfee product (all kinds of zany things I had never even heard of) on everyone's computers. One particularly bad piece of software would intercept filesystem syscalls and I guess generate hashes from the data to do some sort of scan? Whatever it did made hg and the build tools almost unusable. For years ev…

I believe the term you're probably looking for is conglomerate

Re: McAfee S-1

#67

Post by WorldPeas »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #30

It's been 20 years since I vowed to uninstall McAfee (& Symantec) software from every computer I could. I've been pretty consistent at keeping that promise. Probably 1k+ uninstalls.

I worked at a helpdesk for a bit and made this a personal goal too. It actually increased business because people told me "their computer wasn't loud anymore". It's amazing what just removing some software and putting in better ram will do.
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