I bought a new laptop last year. It came with McAfee antivirus. Because I was working from home, I got an email virus from a work email. I don’t think I was the target, I think the hackers were trying to target my school district. The payload was the ech0raix malware. McAfee never detected the virus, and didn’t do a thing to clean the computer.
I lost everything. All of my data. The weakness of the virus is that it saves an encrypted version of all of your files using a randomly generated key. No one with the possible exception of the NSA can decrypt it. Then it deletes the original. That was the weakness that my IT friend was able to exploit. We got the files back, but filenames and metadata was lost. So now I have a couple of hundred thousand files without names. The only way to find out what a file is, is to open it and then rename the file. I gave up on that about 11 months ago. Tedious.
Why do I mention this now?
Because McAffee is telling me that my year subscription is up, and is asking me to renew. They have a money back guarantee that, if you get a virus and they cannot retrieve your data, they will refund you the purchase price of their software.
Being a gambler, I can tell you that this is a sucker’s bet. The overwhelming majority of their users won’t get a virus, thus making you the loser of the bet and McAfee the winner. Those who DO get the virus must send the computer in to be ‘cleaned’ and data recovered, if possible. Those who can’t be cleaned, McAfee ‘loses’ the bet, and you ‘win’ your money back- a push.
This virus software is not very good, and their “guarantee” is a sucker’s bet- a gimmick designed to take your money.
4 Comments
joe · June 5, 2021 at 1:07 pm
McAfee, norton, have sucked since the net started…been a fan of nod32/eset for years…works great…
Kid · June 5, 2021 at 1:45 pm
ditto the above regards mcafee and norton. huge suck.
I have AVG free and I got malwarebytes back when subscription was lifetime. I would pay for malwarebytes if I had to, real time protection and have never had a problem. Granted though you usually have to click on something stupid to get infected.
it's just Boris · June 5, 2021 at 5:37 pm
I haven’t used McAffee in over a decade … the overhead was just too high when I was doing consulting work and computer simulations on a home machine.
We’re using Avast at the moment, which seems to be okay other than the occasionally annoying ad pop-ups, which seem to be getting worse and its rankings have fallen over the past year or so. I’ll need to look into nod32/eset – thanks for the pointer, Joe.
The Freeholder · June 13, 2021 at 12:46 pm
If you want good anti-virus/malware, I can recommend Trend Micro. Have used it for years professionally and personally.
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