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Norton Security 2011 - A Warning

  • 05-04-2011 9:16pm
    #1
    Pacing Mule
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 5,059 ✭✭✭


    I thought this may be the best place to put this. Today Norton completely screwed me (with a bit of help from myself to be fair)

    Norton doing its usual scan picks up a rake of emails with suspicious content. This is nothing new as there are 10+ email accounts on the profile and they attract quite a lot of spam and virus ridden emails. The list of problems found along with their suggested fixes are listed. Norton has a button at the end of the security scan which is a fix all or apply all button (can't remember the exact one) Normally the action suggested is to delete the file and I hit this button without looking properly at what it was going to do for all issues.

    To my considerable horror I then noticed that one of the actions was to "delete the condensed folder inbox" Saw this for a second before it refreshed saying everything has been successfully resolved. So I had a quick gander at our email client (thunderbird) and discover one of the accounts has had its entire inbox deleted.

    No major problem I thought - sure Norton has a quarantine area and it promises it can reverse any fixes it does etc. Had a look in the quarantine section and no reference to my other 2000+ emails. The emails weren't in the deleted items folder nor was the deleted inbox folder in my recycle bin.

    Cutting the rest of a long story short I ended up onto tech support at Norton who informed me that sometimes Norton will decide the best course of action is to delete an entire folder as part of the cleaning / quarantine process. Any other files or folders deleted by the program when resolving the issue are NOT quarantined are deleted permanently and cannot be recovered. Norton quarantined the email in question - I could restore it back with no problems but all the other emails are gone. :mad: Similarily if there was a rogue file in your my pictures folder Norton could delete every picture in it and leave only the rogue file in the quarantine area.

    Now I hold my hands up to clicking on the fix it button and indeed to not having properly backed up the inbox folders which is a lesson learnt BUT the fact remains Norton will make permanent and irreversible deletions if you are not careful. Just wanted to give a heads up to everyone else with it.


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