Norton Scaring Windows 8 Owners

Also, don't forget that the millions of users using their free versions, are also a great source for new malware samples, therefore also helping security vendors to provide the paid clients with better detections. It's a win-win situation.

 

I'll stick to MSE and the extra security Windows 8 provides by default, but thanks for the "warning" Symantec.

 

"Low cost implies poor quality" is a misuse of inductive logic. The correlation is there for a lot of products, but that doesn't make it a universal truth that more expensive = better. IMO this falls in roughly the same category as Microsoft's "Get the Facts" campaign.

(It doesn't help that they lie outright about Norton's efficacy and resource usage.)

 

They are advising Windows 8 users, not scaring them. And now we know the reason. Check out http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/19/win8_rootkit/

 

I expect this crap from kaspersky and now symantec is going in the same direction. Good for sales though...

 

Read the article please, Secure Boot was turned off... in other words, the same as running a BIOS-based PC. The entire article is pointless.

 

You can manually install a rootkit on any OS. The question is whether an attacker or a malicious program can gain sufficient privilege to install one without user interaction.

(Of course there's always social engineering, but AVs are a very poor defense against that.)