Terrence’s Blog

Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.x is a piece of crap!

by on Jul.16, 2008, under Uncategorized

Ok, I’ve currently tried to roll out this product at my company. We have around 15K endpoints that need this software package on them. I will outline all of the problems that we’ve had. Apparently they want the consumer to diagnose and debug the problems for them. My response was, we’ll pull your product if you don’t get it fixed.

I’m curious as to how many clients they’ve lost because of this product. I’m sure it’s quite a few. The thing is that they get a company into a contract agreement and then they are stuck with a crappy product for the duration of the contract. Well, I’m here to say, there are other companies that have better products who will buy out your contracts.

Issues (This is all with the latest version of the product.):

  • Scans tax the CPU and hard drive so much that they either overheat or make the device unusable for the duration of the scan.
  • If the computer does not have network access a liveupdate process will run out of control and eventually grind the system to a halt.
  • Outlook attachments randomly blocked. They said most of their clients were seeing this problem and they asked us to ship them an example laptop. I said, fuck you, these are my laptop, you ship me a tech to look at it.
  • Application and Device Control blocks share viewing and printer viewing on remote sites. I couldn’t even figure out why this was even looking at this traffic let alone blocking it.
  • Cannot configure scans to scan one hard drive, only approved Symantec Locations. Go ahead, try to configure a scheduled scan to scan only drive C or something specific. You can’t, it just isn’t an option. What brain dead sloth designed this shit?
  • These are just a few of the issues we’ve recieved during a small pilot, we’ve stopped the pilot and deployment.

These issues make me look bad as a Security Engineer. I’m ready to switch to a different product to get the promised functionality. The concept is great, the execution is horrible. How the fuck did Gartner rate this highly? It’s undeployable!

I’m calling Sophos right now, McAfee kind of sucks. Maybe CA or TrendMicro have good enterprise solutions as well?

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1 Comment for this entry

  • TheP

    A year later and SEP is still a piece of crap!

    Issue we had:
    * Random file server lockups for 30 minutes and all was ok again
    * Server cluster nodes hung (deinstalling SEP solved it)
    * CA randomly unreachable
    * network congestion

    We are currently looking into Microsoft ForeFront and it looks a lot more promising then that Symantec Crap

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