McAfee Update (8/9/10) causes win 7 Problems

[codyw]

You would think that after not getting them to reconnect that they would look to the security software and not the computers. That would be my open line to say, time for a new security investment. The only part that corporations probably hate is researching what works and what doesn't.

 

[Petey7]

The problem is that the only way to update McAfee is online, but the Cisco software won't let a computer without an active, up-to-date AV connect to the network. Since McAfee needs to be updated, the computers aren't allowed to connect, but McAfee can't be updated without being connected to the internet. They pretty much hung themselves, so its not all McAfee's fault. I'm already biased against McAfee, so I prefer to place part of the blame on their software which failed to update for no apparent reason. I've had a couple long conversations with the IT people at school about it and they can't figure out what the problem was that prevented the updates from installing, and the schools president won't give them permission to remove the restrictions on network use. It's all pretty ridiculous.

 

[Night Hawk]

The restrictions are inplace by school policy for obvious reasons there. The decision to replace Mc something A fail free or fee would be a decision the administration would need to be convinced of would be necessary. That would also mean temporarily allowing exceptions likely through the firewalls they have inplace.

The IT people need to show how MCsickof Afoobar is a total waste of time and have a strong case. Other then that will be something in limbo where they will continue to have a reason to keep employing tech people to work on continual problems rather then a working one time solution.

It's all in the "necessary expenses" they can figure into the school's budget which includes paying for the newer version of same rather then smart shopping for what would work. It's the typical hand in hand burocracy type thinking applied there. "Any decision must go through the board and that's final!"

The ISP the school uses would obviously be endorsing it being what they provide. "We'll use what the ISP recommends!"

 

[codyw]

This ought to be a good school year for me. My school district recently switched to Verizon and they are using McAfee, which is provided by Verizon. All I have to say is, they will have problems, and if I ever bring home a virus or other malicious file on my USB drive because they have software that doesn't work, I WILL be complaining! I try and keep all the computers on my network free of malware, so you can see where this would be a big issue.

 

[Borg 386]

I've always wondered something...since McAfee's home products don't work, I wonder if their corporate products work?

Well, the school ran McAfee corporate software, they had a virus that wouldn't go away, and for about 3 months, every time I got home & plugged in my FD, MSE detected a virus/worm.

When I would scan the drive with McAfee, it showed "all clean".

There's your answer....as far as I'm concerned, nothing from McAfee works

Yeah codyw, school starts for me on the 23rd....whee. After the 22nd, I have no life for 4 months...hopefully they have changed their AV from McAfee although I doubt it

 

[Night Hawk]

Need more be said? I haven't run across very many that haven't drawn the exact same conclusions. With 99% of users having nothing but complaints you would have thought after all these years they would have gotten their act together. Obviously not!

 

[codyw]

I am always seeing advertisements on website for McAfee products. And I just have to shake me head, I agree with you Night Hawk, they should be getting their act together. Now that I know how bad McAfee's corporate products are, I think that's what my school is going with. Since I also have Macintosh systems on my home network, they also have Norton on them. Since there aren't a whole lot of viruses out for Mac, I'll just scan my USB drive on my Mac before I plug it into my PC that way I'm left with no headaches. Norton for Mac seems to have a good detection and real-time engine (Auto-Protect).
I've seen people plug an infected USB drive into their PC and literally infect it to the point of just screaming!

 

[Borg 386]

Yepperz codyw, that's exactly what happened at our school. People plugged in their FD's, took it home & got their PC's messed up. Most notably our writing class, where the teacher would try to access something and it took 3 - 5 minutes to load. I took a look at his PC, overrode the lockouts for the task manager and saw his PC was using 97% net usage and 95% cpu usage. Even when nothing was running. Except for the 5 or 6 programs listed that were obviously worms/viruses.

When I pointed this out to him, he told me "The school has an AV program". I said "Yeah...I guess you can call it that if you wanted to".

WTG McAfee Corporate

I posted an announcement on the Black Board Site for everyone to d/l MSE into their PC's and run it every time they got back from school (although for the most part, as soon as you plugged in your FD MSE instantly detected it and quarantined/deleted it).

Some people told me that their PC's were messed up the same way as the class PC was (High net/processor usage).

I wonder what new viruses await us as we start the new year...:roflmao:

 

[codyw]

I hate to think. There's always a new virus emerging every day. Some of them are nasty enough to send your computer to the repair center or worse. I'm pretty good when it comes to removing viruses and stuff but it's a pain!

 

[Night Hawk]

VIPRE will also bring up an immediate prompt for scanning flash drives or any external hard drive when plugged in and auto detected by Windows. Any better written program will see this protection prompting.

The problem seen at a school however means proving a strong case to the board of directors or whoever runs it that a better program is needed. Simply coming from any student however wouldn't be enough to convince them that any change was needed however. You simply have to take your own precautions from the beginning.

 

[cluberti]

Agreed - usually it would take something bad happening to reconsider an otherwise working antivirus, unless you can do performance or regression testing under their blessing to make sure they're not paying for more than they bargained for. A previous employer used to do this every year, although they had the ability to give us time and budget to performance test our software loads to make sure they performed well at what they were supposed to do, and didn't negatively impact system performance when running. McAfee was in for two years, until it got really bloated and failed both perf tests. It was replaced with Symantec, although from what I heard from a colleague that still works there that SEP got bumped out by Forefront last year after it took down a decent part of the corporate office when it flagged a critical application file as a virus.

 

[codyw]

Since I use NIS 2010, I didn't notice if it has a feature in it that scans removable drives upon plugging them in. Normally, I just right-click the drive and immediately scan it after plugging it in.

 

[Borg 386]

The problem seen at a school however means proving a strong case to the board of directors or whoever runs it that a better program is needed. Simply coming from any student however wouldn't be enough to convince them that any change was needed however. You simply have to take your own precautions from the beginning.

That's it Night Hawk, I brought it to their attention several times, since one of the classes was right down the hall from the server room. I usually got a lame reply of some kind like "We're looking into it".

I finally told them "You've been looking into it for 3 months now & everyone is still getting infected!" They didn't like that....

It was a regular occurrence to go to your class and sometimes your PC wouldn't be working because the virus hosed it....

Maybe I should sneak into the server room & put MSE on it....:sarc:

Oh yeah...another casualty of McCrappy....I ran a SFC a week before this happened...I ran it after the debacle and look what I found:

{10}]"tcpmon.ini" of Microsoft-Windows-Printing-StandardPortMonitor-TCPMonINI, Version = 6.1.7600.16385, pA = PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE_INTEL (0), Culture neutral, VersionScope = 1 nonSxS, PublicKeyToken = , Type neutral, TypeName neutral, PublicKey neutral in the store, hash mismatch
2010-08-10 12:20:45, Info CSI 0000010f [SR] Cannot repair member file [l:20{10}]"tcpmon.ini" of Microsoft-Windows-Printing-StandardPortMonitor-TCPMonINI, Version = 6.1.7600.16385, pA = PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE_INTEL (0), Culture neutral, VersionScope = 1 nonSxS, PublicKeyToken = , Type neutral, TypeName neutral, PublicKey neutral in the store, hash mismatch
2010-08-10 12:20:45, Info CSI 00000110 [SR] This component was referenced by [l:198{99}]"Microsoft-Windows-Foundation-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7600.16385.WindowsFoundationDelivery"
2010-08-10 12:20:45, Info CSI 00000113 [SR] Could not reproject corrupted file [ml:520{260},l:46{23}]"\??\C:\Windows\System32"\[l:20{10}]"tcpmon.ini"; source file in store is also corrupted

Thanx McAfee!

 

[Night Hawk]

Isn't that delightful?! Too bad you couldn't bring your own with a different av program entirely installed and hear people ask why yours is the only one running! That would tick the school's staff off royally after having given you the usual "brush off"!

Don't think for a moment Mc A foo isn't giving the school a break on prices. Just like any other institution once they've made a decision on something it's "Mission Impossible" trying to sway them since you are only a student that comes and goes while they live there. That's how they look at things.

(in fact they'll likely simply pass the buck by saying one of our students brought in a virus.)

 

[codyw]

Of course! Blame it on the students! That's probably what most of them would do anyways. They would look at the ways how students could be infecting the school computers (e.g. opening personal emails with or without attachments, thumb drives, bad websites) who knows. I can't believe that there is something as bad as McAfee's corporate products on the web that just don't work. As much as they advertise them, you would think that they would work and live up to what they are supposed to. But apparently not.

 

[Night Hawk]

Unfortunately some companies are nothing but mere "profit houses" looking at the bottom dollar as to how well the sales are over offering the actual support base. I've run into that with other types of softwares and software support simply lacking for hardwares and devices sold in retail stores as well.

Sometimes the buy cheap ends up being the very limited or no support at all situation. "cheap support"!

(seen that with low cost digital camcorders that come without any software disk and no downloads available at the manufacturer's site!)

 

[codyw]

The way I look at it - if a company is bad, they have poor support, and/or charge you for every time you call, their products don't live up to the means they should as advertised, they are not worth buying. In a world of computer threats today, how thousands emerging everyday, you NEED stable and strong protection, not a suite that just tells your computer that it has one but then sits there when you're being attacked.

 

[Borg 386]

OK, the way I see it is like this:

It's a school, of course you are going to have students bringing in infected files or going to questionable sites.

But this is where the schools responsibility comes in, to expect behavior like that and compensate for it the best they can. By using a strong, proven AV, since it's basically a "Free for all" when it comes to files, websites and what not.

Not everything catches everything, but when you have a persistant virus that's been in the system for 3+ months and the AV you're using isn't weeding it out, then it's time to switch!

Another disturbing thing I've seen, I've walked past the server room several times, it was wide open with no one inside.

 

[codyw]

It sounds like the personnel in the server room could careless! I guess if they want to have infected computers on their network, then that is their choice.

 

[Night Hawk]

What that shows is a lack of security in other areas besides which av program is being run! Sloppy for sure!

One reason why the av program here is favored over others is that it combines various protections along with a good firewall. Even when going to download a manual for a board from one company one of the regional links was blocked due to something it detected. I had to put the US link in as an exception on a name brand companie's site showing it can be a little overprotective at times!