Yeah, I don't get the hate for Symantec either. It works, it's caught infections on machines that the other stuff (*cough* McAfee *cough*) has outright missed. This isn't just an opinion either - I cleaned the infections off the machines myself. Thankfully I've never had an active virus infection on any of my own computers the 12 years I've owned PC's so far. I must be doing something right I think.
Aye, some viruses try to disguise themselves and modify themselves as they infect (see polymorphic) so the more advanced virus checkers use heuristics to try to catch virus-like activity which sometimes results in a false positive, but stops programs from infecting you even if the infecting agent doesn't have a signature in some database somewhere just yet. I think what's happened is some companies selling antivirus products rely more on consumer ignorance, the "Just leave it to us, WE know what's best for you" attitude. CA's approach of saying "oh no, you modified it so now it's a variant" stinks of this kind of BS, which is what I've come to expect of CA.
I'm very surprised McAfee didn't respond at all, but I'm not surprised their product was vulnerable. If anything, McAfee has caused problems than done any good on systems I've seen it installed on. Said problems range from missed infections to system instabilities to outright hard crashes.
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