
Symantec to Buy Identity Theft Protection Company LifeLock for $2.3B - JumpCrisscross
http://www.wsj.com/articles/symantec-to-buy-identity-theft-protection-company-lifelock-1479692089
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chrisd1100
If you've ever listened to Rush Limbaugh with your conservative father, you
can't go more than 15 minutes without hearing an ad for LifeLock. Their
audience seems to be paranoid older people who don't understand technology and
are looking for piece of mind.

Side note: Here's another kind of ridiculous service that I hear advertised on
conservative talk radio: [https://www.reagan.com/](https://www.reagan.com/)

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jonlucc
$33 a year for an email service that doesn't do spam filtering?

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bretpiatt
The service does spam filtering, that's different than scanning the contents
of your email to put up display ads on your mail client (ex. Gmail, Yahoo,
etc.) or selling your behavioral information and email address to third
parties (other "free" mail services).

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wslh
I remember this: "The legal battle between LifeLock and Xapo just got more
intense": [http://fortune.com/2015/07/28/lifelock-xapo-wences-cross-
com...](http://fortune.com/2015/07/28/lifelock-xapo-wences-cross-complaint/)

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lucasgonze
Identity theft is the one big threat model for most people.

It's a broad umbrella that includes pretty much all personal digital security,
like webcam hacking.

So I can see the strategic sense of this.

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gigatexal
Who knew lifelock would be worth billions. It always seemed like a scam

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Grishnakh
It's not unique. McAfee, Symantec, etc. are scams too, and they're worth
billions. AMEX is a scam and it's worth billions.

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EpicEng
How exactly is amex a scam?

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yalogin
Honestly I thought Lifelock is a scam. Is it not?

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dhimes
Came here seeking the answer to this question, too.

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pyabo
Symantec's lost its bearings a long time ago, this is another false move ...

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dhimes
You are scaring me. I use Norton on a Windows box that I use for
travel/remote.

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WorldMaker
Norton is one of the first things I uninstall on people's Windows machines
when I encounter it in the wild. The zombie corpses of both Norton and McAfee
consumer products seem locked in a head to head battle to produce the worst,
most ransomiest security theater software they can imagine.

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dhimes
What should I use instead?

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WorldMaker
I tend to recommend Windows Defender.

Since Windows 8, Windows Defender has an antivirus out of the box in every
ordinary Windows install. If you are uninstalling Norton or McAfee you may
have to do some extra work to untangle the hacks those programs tend to use to
disable Windows Defender.

For Windows 7 (and XP if you are crazy/desperate) the antivirus component of
Windows Defender was called Windows Security Essentials and had to be
downloaded separately due to the statute of limitations in the EU anti-trust
decision. You need to be careful that you find a legitimate Microsoft link for
Security Essentials because there were a number of trojan horse authors that
took advantage of this being a required separate download.

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dhimes
OK thanks. It's Win 10.

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tyho
Why? By the sound of it they are totally fraudulent. The CEO invited people to
steal his identity to promote his company, it was stolen 13 times[0]. They
have repeatedly been fined by the FTC for lying about the effectiveness of
their product totaling $112m, with the FTC chairman saying:

"the protection they provided left such a large hole ... that you could drive
that truck through it."

and they

"falsely advertised that it protected consumers’ sensitive data".

[0]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20100521030228/http://www.wired....](https://web.archive.org/web/20100521030228/http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/lifelock-
identity-theft)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LifeLock#Controversies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LifeLock#Controversies)

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steveax
The real scam here is foisting "identity theft" off on the consumers rather
than holding the financial institutions and other players responsible.

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sk5t
Hear, hear! The essential idea of "identity theft" as a thing menacing
individuals, rather than "theft from a business due to fraud / sloppy security
practices," should be deeply offensive to all people.

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nodesocket
> The deal will value LifeLock at $24 a share, a 16% premium to its Friday
> price of $20.75...

Actually it is even more than that if you look at the chart for LOCK
([https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1479709994206&chddm=8211&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NYSE:LOCK&ntsp=1&ei=n5QyWKGECcanjAGW4aXoDA)).
Check out the price increase since Nov 11th. Insider trade much?

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ec109685
This was rumored for a little while:
[http://www.investopedia.com/news/symantec-among-potential-
bi...](http://www.investopedia.com/news/symantec-among-potential-bidders-
lifelock-symc/)

It is really unfortunate folks feel like they have to pay for these services.

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bitJericho
This is a rich person service. Don't feel bad for them. What they're buying is
someone else to watch their credit so they can go do whatever they want. The
other customers are corporations that get hacked and then have to pay for
credit monitoring.

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xyzzy123
Yep, in a sense, buying lifelock is really a "long" position on future data
breaches. The money comes from companies buying 100k+ "seats" after they lose
a bunch of pii.

Which is interesting right? "security" company essentially betting that
security measures won't work.

I suppose they're at least in a good position to have some insight on that.

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jdavis703
Betting that security won't work is called defense in depth. Security people
are paid to be paranoid, so if one level fails you hopefully have another.
It's like keeping a gun by your bed, even though you feel confident in your
lock.

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xyzzy123
I see your point but I think a more accurate analogy would be a safety company
buying shares in hospitals.

This is not so much defense in depth as the ambulance at the bottom of the
cliff. Funded by a company that makes fences.

I think this supports your point of view, but it's kind of a 2.3bn dollar
statement about how well fences are working out for people.

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boggydepot
Accumulation of 'Means of Production' in Action.

