Discovering Myself

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?

Assassin's Creed

I bought a PS3 on Saturday, I haven’t had a chance to get too into yet.  I did go out and buy Assassin’s Creed, which is the best game I’ve played on the thing so far.  I like the freeform gameplay style as opposed to the forced storyline style most games these days have.