After McAfee, Symantec Now Faces Flack

Just a month after McAfee released an update that ended up deleting important programs in computers, it's now Symantec's turn to face the music. A critical bug has been identified in Norton Antivirus that allows a hacker to gain complete control over a computer running the antivirus software.

This is especially troublesome for home users who do not turn on automatic updates for their software in order to save bandwidth. Corporate computers usually install latest updates. Now that the vulnerability is public, any worm that is created to exploit this vulnerability would inevitably find some computers unpatched, and hence allow a hacker to gain access to the computer.

In view of these announcements, I'm very attracted to open-source (read free) anti-virus software, at least for home use. Three major examples are AVG Free Edition, avast! Home Edition and AntiVir Personal Edition. At least I won't be paying for software that harms my computer, instead of protecting it.