Week 12 - Norton Antivirus and You!

 Viruses, malware, ransomware, and all the other harmful things we may run into online are why having an antivirus program or detector is essential. However, Norton's tactics and performance are egregious, and people should not use them for this reason. Not only does it take up a significant amount of system resources to run, even in the background, but the high cost and troubles it gives users when trying to cancel or uninstall is a headache that shouldn’t exist. On top of this, the fact that it is advertised to run “real-time” diagnostics is a lie, as it does not continuously run to catch things that are actively going on with your machine, as well as a plethora of other problems (like an outdated list of the issues it searches for instead of the rapidly evolving threats that appear today). Though a lot of these issues are mainly reported by members of the online community and not Norton themselves, I shall link a handful of forums that one should at least look at before spending money on this service.

 Here is a Reddit link that has comments discussing the plethora of issues.

 And here is Jason Thor Hall, a previous member of the Department of Energy and a black badge DEFCON holder discussing why Norton is bad, and his thoughts on the worst malware that infects computers.