>>Hello Al,
>>
>>I never suspected that it could be a virus or malware.
>>
>>I already knew about malwarebytes.
>>
>>Why did you suggested TrendMicro instead of another one like Symantec for example?
>
>Anything but Symantec. It's worse than a virus, impossible to kill and does more damage. The app they bought was okay for the time, but they have this perfect Midas touch - whatever they take into their hands turns into crap.

In the early days Symantec bloated up and became a serious resource hog. Then they had an epiphany, rewrote all their code and for a while were the best-performing AV. They even had a real-time CPU usage monitor to show just how lean they were.

For a number of years now CPU usage hasn't been an issue (multi-core CPUs commonplace) so as long as the user can tolerate the hit on storage subsystem performance there hasn't been much to choose between the various vendors. That said, in the consumer space Symantec is on my permanent shitlist because of this: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/01/norton-360-now-comes-with-a-cryptominer/

Symantec's business security products were bought by Broadcom. It took almost a full year for Broadcom to cut over order processing and billing; during that time no-one could buy new product or renew existing subscriptions. Broadcom silently extended subscriptions for that time period but the uncertainty and hassle cost my clients more than the product was worth. For the few still using it, Broadcom's paranoia makes using the product console painful - enforced password changes every something like 60 or 90 days (can't be changed) combined with multi-level CAPTCHAs at each sign-in. Regardless of possible technical merit I can't recommend a product that's so actively painful to use.

- I investigated BitDefender. Multiple e-mail back&forth and follow-ups with their Romania-based office, they never got me in touch with any reseller who could sell me their product in Canada. Nonetheless, over a year later I was still getting spam from them

- I had one client on ESET. When it came time to renew they had re-jigged their SMB offerings, a renewal was going to cost 5x the original purchase price. When I tried to contact customer service there was ZERO response - multiple phone calls over multiple days diverted to full voice mailboxes, no response to e-mails or website contact forms. I called ESET tech support, while I was on the line the tech tried to reach CS on their dedicated line and got the same no response/voice mailbox overflow situation

Of the SMB offerings I've recently used, Trend is the least bad. But even they have the same issue that seems to plague all SMB security products - painfully slow order processing/customer service. Most seem to require working through resellers. They recommend renewing *at least* 30 days prior to expiration of subscription, and even if you do that, half the time you're yelling at the reseller in the final week to make it happen. These renewals are all for cloud-based products, all they need to do is update the subscription expiration date in their back end. It could not be easier for them; why is it so painful for SMB customers?