
Symantec Is Now NortonLifeLock - hbcondo714
https://investor.nortonlifelock.com/About/Investors/press-releases/press-release-details/2019/Symantec-Completes-Sale-of-Enterprise-Security-Assets-to-Broadcom/default.aspx
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LeoPanthera
I see lots of comments from people who don't know what "LifeLock" is. To save
you the trip to Wikipedia:

"LifeLock Inc. is an American identity theft protection company based in
Tempe, Arizona. LifeLock was founded by Robert Maynard Jr. and Todd Davis in
2005. LifeLock’s identity theft protection system detects fraudulent
applications for credit and illegal use of personal information. It also
monitors the use of personal information and credit score changes. As of 9
February 2017, it is a subsidiary of Symantec."

It is mostly famous for being somewhere between being really terrible at
actually protecting your identity, and being an outright scam. The
"controversies" section is worth reading:

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

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ohazi
Are there any credit monitoring or "identity theft prevention" services that
_aren 't_ outright scams?

Most of them spend huge amounts of money on scare-tactic ads, use shady free-
trial-with-automatic-billing-that's-impossible-to-cancel sign-up models, and
are cagey about what exactly they're monitoring and how their flagging works.

It's too easy to run these sorts of businesses as "do absolutely nothing,
collect checks every month, suffer no consequences if things go wrong because
the event is rare, profit is purely a function of sales team size" operations.

Kind of like the anti-virus market, actually... I guess this is a good match!

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scarface74
CreditKarma is legit and free. Of course just like any other free service, you
are the product. They recommend products to you based on your credit and
finances. They also give you full weekly access to your Transunion and Equifax
credit reports.

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jeanpierre2
Is this just me as a non-native speaker, or does "Norton LifeLock" sound...
kind of sinister? Like something out of a dystopian novel?

I'm actually not quite sure what the name is supposed to mean. Are they
locking my life to protect me from evil hackers?

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ben509
It sounds like they're trying to sacrifice the remaining scraps of Peter
Norton's reputation in order to make a horcrux.

~~~
Frost1x
*The antivirus that shall not be named

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guardiangod
So what's the difference between 'enterprise security' and 'consumer security'
products?

I work for a (partial) competitor and I can't really imagine splitting our
company into consumer and enterprise versions.

Exploits are exploits, no matter if the target is a Windows XP in an AD
domain, or a Windows 10 video game box in a home. A lot of threat
analysis/discover infrastructures need to be duplicated, let alone the
analysts and reverse engineering engineers.

~~~
hadlock
Enterprise security is typically B2B with annual contracts in the tens to
hundreds of thousands of dollars; most any company dealing with any kind of
PII requires every employee workstation/laptop to have a security product
installed with periodic scans, often daily, and then an audit trail a mile
long.

Vs. consumer security, I am guessing, Windows has a built in virus scanner now
that's pretty good, and also free; LifeLock is a sort of credit
freeze/identity theft monitoring service... a product marketed directly to
consumers, but also as a pack-in offering that credit card companies are
starting to offer to customers for free, especially as part of settlements due
to personal information breach legal settlements. Different market/scope.

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xref
Norton Utilities, Norton DiskDefrag, Norton Anti-virus (earrrly versions) were
all great, man I used them heavily. This news feels like more of a eulogy for
what was Symantec

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elweston2
His books on x86 assembly helped me out a bunch too.

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mikehollinger
So ignore the “life lock” stuff for a moment. Is anyone paying attention to
the gobbling up of second-tier suppliers that broadcom’s been steadily doing?
The life lock stuff is the stuff that Broadcom for some reason found
indigestible.

Go look at the history of acquisitions over the last 20 years. [1] LSI, PMC-
Sierra, Avago, Infineon, Brocade, CA... It’s highly likely that any electronic
device has a Broadcom chip or component inside of it.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom_Inc.#History](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom_Inc.#History)

~~~
walrus01
It's logical if you look at Qualcomm and its history of acquisitions.

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edoceo
Same scam, new brand? Whatever happened to the Norton class of product? Those
delivered good value to the user. Did what they promised, didn't spy, didn't
upsell me through FUD and dark patterns.

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ben509
Looking at their history[1], they got commoditized. They were first clobbered
as the OS vendors started to build in utilities that were good enough for most
people, and later open source software was better.

Add to that they wanted to capture a larger demographic, so they've exited the
hobbyist market entirely and got into PC optimization / AV / VPN snake oil.
They became the crapware you have to delete from a new Windows machine.

And now branding themselves after ID theft snake oil? If you burned $30 a
month at least you'd get warm.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Utilities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Utilities)

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lowercased
Does this feel to anyone else like Symantec has been the victim of identity
theft?

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deadlyllama
Norton Utilities were great! Not sure about the later products.

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rejschaap
Norton Commander was great too and Peter Norton wrote the book on programming
the IBM PC.

IIRC Norton AntiVirus was a rebranding of Symantec's antivirus software and
probably the first usage of Norton's name for marketing reasons whereas
NortonLifeLock is the last.

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anilakar
Was? It still is! Used it two weeks ago when I had to copy some files to my
DOS retro machine and I could not be bothered to re-learn the xcopy syntax
after all these Linux years :)

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jpswade
Why life lock? What does that mean?

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welly
I guess they're suggesting that they put a lock on your life so others can't
steal it. It's a pretty tenuous metaphor.

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badsavage
xd

