Hot Take Should You Trust McAfee in 2023?

[Trident]

VirusTotal -> Although McAfee detects it as Artemis!198877A8CE99 on VT, detection will not appear on the consumer side, due to False Positive Mitigation function. I've sent email to McAfee Lab many times, still not use.

I had contacted McAfee many times regarding this. On my tests I had proven that protection was inconsistent first of all, depending on the day, it might be stellar, better than Bitdefender, other days it may be bad and miss everything I try. The VirusTotal thing as well is correct and not related only to the false positives mitigation. On many occasions something would be blocked by the business products and on VirusTotal, whilst home products still won’t detect anything.

The avert lab had explained that it’s due to some products utilising early warning services with the expectation that they will be managed properly by an IT admin, whilst the home products are more “forgiving”.

But still, McAfee offers good feature set with acceptable for the home users protection. It is also fairly good in blocking phishing and other nasties.
Users who want strong security should not really expect that from McAfee.

Many of these misses and problems are not unique just to them. There are some industry-wide problems only few don’t suffer.

 

[Anthony Qian]

I had contacted McAfee many times regarding this. On my tests I had proven that protection was inconsistent first of all, depending on the day, it might be stellar, better than Bitdefender, other days it may be bad and miss everything I try. The VirusTotal thing as well is correct and not related only to the false positives mitigation. On many occasions something would be blocked by the business products and on VirusTotal, whilst home products still won’t detect anything.

The avert lab had explained that it’s due to some products utilising early warning services with the expectation that they will be managed properly by an IT admin, whilst the home products are more “forgiving”.

But still, McAfee offers good feature set with acceptable for the home users protection. It is also fairly good in blocking phishing and other nasties.
Users who want strong security should not really expect that from McAfee.

Many of these misses and problems are not unique just to them. There are some industry-wide problems only few don’t suffer.

Due to the current stage of development in the antivirus software industry, where products from various companies have become increasingly homogenous, having only an "acceptable" level of protection is no longer sufficient. There are many superior products available on the market that one can choose from.

 

[Trident]

The current state of home security products today is where they no longer focus on malware protection and prevention - these were the tides 15 years ago.

Consumer security for the past few years has been focused on keeping identity, personal information and money safe.
Malware is not the only threat in this direction - in fact I am not exactly sure how much money is lost to attacks where malware is involved, but I am sure phishing, scams and other attacks top the chart. McAfee is not the best in malware prevention (though some professional tests claim otherwise for years), but it offers other features which may be beneficial to users in the event their identity is stolen, which is one of the main reasons why users wish to install security products in the first place.

The product is easy to use, relatively stable, specially compared to some others which fix BSODs every month and list that on their changelog, actively developed and offered with additional features which home users can utilise to increase their privacy and security, such as VPN and the TrueKey password manager. It is not a product that is underdeveloped in any way.

MalwareTips users should accept and acknowledge that not everyone installs security product to download drivers from Chinese forums and scripts, and test it against them.

 

[Anthony Qian]

The current state of home security products today is where they no longer focus on malware protection and prevention - these were the tides 15 years ago.

Consumer security for the past few years has been focused on keeping identity, personal information and money safe.
Malware is not the only threat in this direction - in fact I am not exactly sure how much money is lost to attacks where malware is involved, but I am sure phishing, scams and other attacks top the chart. McAfee is not the best in malware prevention (though some professional tests claim otherwise for years), but it offers other features which may be beneficial to users in the event their identity is stolen, which is one of the main reasons why users wish to install security products in the first place.

The product is easy to use, relatively stable, specially compared to some others which fix BSODs every month and list that on their changelog, actively developed and offered with additional features which home users can utilise to increase their privacy and security, such as VPN and the TrueKey password manager. It is not a product that is underdeveloped in any way.

MalwareTips users should accept and acknowledge that not everyone installs security product to download drivers from Chinese forums and scripts, and test it against them.

I don't agree that McAfee is stable and cause no problems. In 2021, McAfee ran into some problems registering with Microsoft Security Center, which took McAfee nearly three months to resolve. (Windows Security Center notifies that Windows defender and McAfee VirusScan are turned off)

 

[Trident]

I don't agree that McAfee is stable and cause no problems. In 2021, McAfee ran into some problems registering with Microsoft Security Center, which took McAfee nearly three months to resolve. (Windows Security Center notifies that Windows defender and McAfee VirusScan are turned off)

Registering with Security Centre which has been reported there by one user (on the link provided, not sure if there are other reports) fades compared to the issues that I see on the Avast and Bitdefender changelog and forum being reported and fixed every month, every year, again and again, and again, and widely reported by many users. The Avast anti-rooktit driver has not once or twice been reported to cause much more severe problems (BSODs).
Yes, they have a hyper-fast and light engine that scans with 15% CPU usage (gigabytes per second) detects a lot (even on the malware hub we can see frequently it is the only one to detect via static scan) and they have high level of offline detection as well. They also have the Evo-Gen that writes signatures automatically in a matter of minutes and they are just few bytes long.
They have other issues however.

Every product has upsides and downsides and in the end, it is up to the user to decide what they need.

 

[Anthony Qian]

Registering with Security Centre which has been reported there by one user (on the link provided, not sure if there are other reports) fades compared to the issues that I see on the Avast and Bitdefender changelog and forum being reported and fixed every month, every year, again and again, and again, and widely reported by many users. The Avast anti-rooktit driver has not once or twice been reported to cause much more severe problems (BSODs).
Yes, they have a hyper-fast and light engine that scans with 15% CPU usage (gigabytes per second) detects a lot (even on the malware hub we can see frequently it is the only one to detect via static scan) and they have high level of offline detection as well. They also have the Evo-Gen that writes signatures automatically in a matter of minutes and they are just few bytes long.
They have other issues however.

Every product has upsides and downsides and in the end, it is up to the user to decide what they need.

McAfee's issue with Security Center is widespread (Redirecting Redirecting).
I also don't think Avast is one of the stable AV products, so please don't use Avast as an example.

 

[Trident]

McAfee's issue with Security Center is widespread (Redirecting Redirecting).
I also don't think Avast is one of the stable AV products, so please don't use Avast as an example.

They all have various issues and bugs reported at all times, a lot of them neglected and around for years. The Norton Safe Web not available after incognito mode in Chrome took years to get fixed. Some of them like Bitdefender are a lot more prone to serious issues, the number of times vsserv.exe has been reported to crash (even on the news) is very high.
Trend Micro for years couldn’t fix the bug where their UI hangs and won’t load completely or the mute mode that randomly gets enabled and disabled without anything in full screen mode.
Microsoft for years refuses to fix various design and implementation errors, and stupidities.

So I am not sure which one exactly you consider “stable” or “superior”. I hope it’s not Microsoft Defender that product you are referring to.

 

[Anthony Qian]

They all have various issues and bugs reported at all times, a lot of them neglected and around for years. The Norton Safe Web not available after incognito mode in Chrome took years to get fixed. Some of them like Bitdefender are a lot more prone to serious issues, the number of times vsserv.exe has been reported to crash (even on the news) is very high.
Trend Micro for years couldn’t fix the bug where their UI hangs and won’t load completely or the mute mode that randomly gets enabled and disabled without anything in full screen mode.
Microsoft for years refuses to fix various design and implementation errors, and stupidities.

So I am not sure which one exactly you consider “stable” or “superior”. I hope it’s not Microsoft Defender that product you are referring to.

After all, McAfee is definitely not one of the stable products out there.

 

[Trident]

After all, McAfee is definitely not one of the stable products out there.

Well I don’t remember news with headline “McAfee leaves systems unprotected for the internet safety day” or something of this sort, but there was such about Bitdefender (which you previously mentioned and probably consider superior, haven’t searched your posts here). I am sure I can find this article with few taps. So it seems it is one of the “more stable” out there.

 

[Anthony Qian]

Well I don’t remember news with headline “McAfee leaves systems unprotected for the internet safety day” or something of this sort, but there was such about Bitdefender (which you previously mentioned and probably consider superior, haven’t searched your posts here). I am sure I can find this article with few taps. So it seems it is one of the “more stable” out there.

Not sure what you are referring to. Seems off-topic, I'm afraid. And for this reason, I won't reply to this thread.

 

[Trident]

Not sure what you are referring to. Seems off-topic, I'm afraid.

Bitdefender Ironically Stopped Working on Safer Internet Day

Ironically on what has become known as Safer Internet Day, users of Bitdefender Antivirus are reporting today that the security software has suddenly stopped working. After installing an update, Bitdefender users are seeing errors that state "The Bitdefender Security Service (vsserv.exe) is...

www.bleepingcomputer.com

I can’t find similar articles about McAfee…

So tell us which one is the “stable product”.

 

[Shadowra]

No

Not because I had a bad experience, but I don't like McAfee at all.
Where Symantec/Norton started from scratch, McAfee for me has always remained in its world of heavy and complicated antivirus...
And I don't like their aggressive mode pushing the user to panic, but Norton does it too.

 

[Trident]

No

Not because I had a bad experience, but I don't like McAfee at all.
Where Symantec/Norton started from scratch, McAfee for me has always remained in its world of heavy and complicated antivirus...
And I don't like their aggressive mode pushing the user to panic, but Norton does it too.

You are right. After all, we remember how John McAfee started and got rich, right?

But again, these upsells, cross-sells and whatnot using alerts and scaring tactics has become a norm.
You can’t really discard a product just because of that because you will install this one and then the other one and the third, fourth, fifth one and they are all the same. The same level of protection (hit here, miss there), the same tactics, alerts, similar prices, similar UIs…
Not much difference.

 

[Trident]

@safna thanks for copying ChatGPT replies.

 

[Popolitus]

On that channel, theres a video saying total AV is the best option for a gamer xD sorry but can not take you serious

 

[Trident]

On that channel, theres a video saying total AV is the best option for a gamer xD sorry but can not take you serious

Yeah, TotalAV is partially, (emphasis on partially because Avira has more technology not implemented) based on Avira. Avira has the infamous game optimiser borrowed from Bullguard which was deemed one of the best options for gamers. Not sure why would anyone choose TotalAV over Avira. The company doesn’t have one malware analysis writeup published. These guys don’t care about cyber-security one bit.