Symantec to Buy Identity Theft Protection Company LifeLock for $2.3B | Hacker News Reader

Symantec to Buy Identity Theft Protection Company LifeLock for $2.3B

wsj.com

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/

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

Spam filtering used to be a client feature. I'm sure it could work that way again.

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).

> Unlike some of the largest email service providers like Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail, @Reagan.com will not copy, scan, or sell a single word of your email content. Your "Private" email will stay "Private"!

Is this true? Is it possible, with current SMTP requirements? I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they're not actively copying it for the purpose of keeping records they can give to someone else, or scanning it to insert ads.

But to act as a mail server, in my understanding of the state of the art, they need to take incoming mail in a format they can decrypt it - functionally equivalent to 'scanning' it. They need to store it on their servers - 'copy' it - so you can download it over POP3 (or IMAP, in which case it remains on the server).

I don't think it's possible to act as a no-knowledge mail server given current mail requirements without using PGP. And to do a bit of demographic analysis, the group of people who "Feel pride of owning an email address with Ronald Reagan's name" have a narrow intersection with the group of people familiar with PGP.

Of course an email provider can't be zero-knowledge. They're just a warrant, NSL, or social engineering away from disclosing the full contents of any (or all) persons email. Just like any other email service. And the metadata from any person using their service will be swept up by any security service listening in between without a warrant.

So the whole "private" thing is just baseless marketing.

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...

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.

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

It literally is a scam. They were sued for the ads claiming their CEO never had his identity stolen after advertising his social security number. Turns out it was stolen multiple times. That's why you never see the ads anymore.

(and apparently the FTC is after them AGAIN): http://fortune.com/2015/07/21/ftc-lifelock/

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

How exactly is amex a scam?

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

Came here seeking the answer to this question, too.

Coincidentally so are the antivirus programs for the last ~5-7 years.

Its trivial to bypass every single antivirus product on the market.

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

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

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.

What should I use instead?

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.

OK thanks. It's Win 10.

Bitdefender or Kaspersky according to https://www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/home-windows/

To check untrusted files that are not sensitive, you can use https://www.virustotal.com/ which will check them with all the major antivirus software.

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LifeLock#Controversies

When you put it like that, Lifelock sounds like a perfect fit for Symantec, no?

Because LifeLock is an identity theft insurance company. They help to get your identity back and pay for all the cost, up to $1M. People buy that.

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

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.

Mitchell and Webb do a nice comedy bit on identity theft, making the same distinction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E

> 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&...). Check out the price increase since Nov 11th. Insider trade much?

This was rumored for a little while: http://www.investopedia.com/news/symantec-among-potential-bi...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've known people that were not rich by any means but felt they had to pay for this.

Poor people can't afford this service.

I didn't say poor, I said not rich. Unless you're going to claim anyone who can afford an extra $10 a month is rich, I don't see what point you're trying to make.

Accumulation of 'Means of Production' in Action.

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