Upgrade to 12.1.4 with IPS and Antivirus for Mac OS X 10.9 (or lower), better Mac management and all the protection and performance capabilities for your Windows and Virtual Machines in a single solution. If you are still on these older product versions, we strongly encourage you to upgrade to version 12.1 free of charge as part of your maintenance/support subscription. Sophos Anti-Virus is another popular tool that has succumbed to its own flaws in an attempt to 'protect' users against a malware threat.On JSymantec Endpoint Protection 11.x and Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition 12.0 reached End-of-Life and have currently been running in Limited Support. The AutoProtect component of Norton AntiVirus produced an issue with apparent corruption of Mac OS X temp files that could result in spiking processor usage and complete system unresponsiveness.Version 9.0.1 of Norton AntiVirus resolved this issue. Normally, Norton AntiVirus deletes this file when scanning the archives is complete, though it may not be deleted automatically. The file contains no actual data and may be deleted. This was a temporary file that Norton AntiVirus created when scanning archives on your computer to help determine the amount of free space available on the disk before it begins unstuffing and scanning archives. Version 9.0 of Norton Antivirus spawned a file appropriately named 'spacesuckingfile.xxxxxx' after it completed a virus scan.The company also recommended that users 'Scan Compressed Files' to 'Off' in the Norton Auto-Protect pane of System Preferences to mitigate this vulnerability. Symantec posted an antivirus based protection signature to LiveUpdate on December 20, 2005, providing a heuristic detection for potential exploits of the Symantec decomposer RAR archive vulnerability.

These vulnerabilities can be exploited remotely without user interaction in default configurations through common protocols such as SMTP. The vulnerability was as follows: During decompression of RAR files Symantec is vulnerable to multiple heap overflows allowing attackers complete control of the system(s) being protected.

Ironically, a 'highly critical' flaw was found in Norton AntiVirus.

First, let's look at some of the problems that have been caused, on a widespread basis, by Symantec's Norton AntiVirus:

Symantec mac