Kaspersky v.8 - problem child or is it just me?

calimar · 2012-10-11T16:50:56.000Z

Has anyone else had system-wide issues in deploying the latest generation of Kaspersky Security Center, Kaspersky Endpoint Security, or Kaspersky Security 8.0 for Exchange, or is it just me? The only feature of this entire package that we have gotten to work reliably is the slave administration servers, but that is worthless if we can’t get the clients to work properly, or the Exchange mailstore scanner to quit crashing store.exe and/or randomly dismounting databases…

And their tech support seems to have taken a turn for the worse as well - telling me that until I am running the absolute latest version of the product, they can’t help me (problem is, we can’t get it to work without crashing any machine that it touches).

Signed ~ Frustrated!

@Cisco

Yorkshire-Wolf · 2012-10-11T17:11:59.000Z

You are far from the only one my friend…

Been testing it since first release of 8, and found it all but unusable, most recent test last month showed no significant change.

Stability was a more minor issue for me, major issue was resource usage. When a scan started, even the quad-core PCs slowed to an absolute crawl, and all Kaspersky could suggest was “schedule them outside business hours”. Frikkin hilarious when you consider we run 24/7. so what do I do? only set up scans for public holidays, on the off chance we shut down for them?

as long as they continue to supply definition updates, we will be staying on 6 MP4. Most stable they have.

marty · 2012-10-11T17:18:22.000Z

I had it installed since inception (to test), and I didn’t make it out of that phase, as I couldn’t install it on any other clients due to performance problems (and some functional issues) on (primarily) XP Boxes that caused me to not roll it.

Your issues are not unheard of. IMO, they put more into their consumer line than their business line – but that’s just my opinion over what I’ve seen over the last few years. Tech support has always been hit or miss. Rarely have I gotten good support from any AV vendors I’ve worked with.

Regards,

Marty

Yorkshire-Wolf · 2012-10-11T17:26:57.000Z

Ive had really good experiences all round with Kaspersky… right up to the release of v8…

francoiscloutier5322 · 2012-10-11T17:28:29.000Z

I am currently deploying Kaspersky 8 and I have yet to run into any stability issues… But so far it’s only been installed on 13systems.

I was advised to tweak the default settings a bit:

Disable the vulnerability monitor (I created a task I run once a week during lunch)
Enable the “concede resources to other applications”
Perform Idle Scan

I also had to create an exclusion for the cisco vpn client to work.

We’re using a hosted email server, so It’s not going to be installed there either.

So far I really like their Security Center, It’s much better then Trend Micro’s

Have you tried to go thru your reseller for some additional push? Mine put me in contact with a Kaspersky engineer that was truly great in helping me fine tune our Installation.

paul653 · 2012-10-11T17:35:00.000Z

We’re seeing the resource hogging that others have mentioned, and that has been an annoyance. Biggest issue we’ve had after deploying to 140 workstations was BSOD after upgrade on some XP machines. On a fresh image, v8 isn’t an issue, but upgrading from v6 to v8 caused some machines to crash intermittently. We re-imaged the problem boxes, about 6-8 in total I think.

rme88 · 2012-10-11T19:17:27.000Z

We have been using v8 for the last 8 or 9 months and haven’t had any issues with it. It doesn’t use that many resources compared to other AV products.

calimar · 2012-10-11T19:35:54.000Z

To all: I really like the new console - sometimes a little polish works good for me, but the clients are a disaster…

We have tried the “concede resources” option, but it doesn’t seem to work well. I have the vulnerability scans disabled as part of the policy, but some of the clients refuse to accept the policy even though they show in the console as “managed”.

On top of that, of the 25 or so instances that we have installed for production testing, 75% constantly state that they need rebooted, 15% seem to be marching to their own drum, and the other 10% were on VM’s (for more testing), in which case they totally BSOD’ed the VM’s - 100% of our VM test has failed to date - doesn’t seem to matter if it is Win7 or XP, new or in-production image.

Then comes the Exchange client - doesn’t seem to be throwing a fit on our Edge server, but on the Mailbox and Hub Transport server it is causing all CPU’s to sit at 95% usage as well as seeming to randomly dismount mailstores. The only way that I have been able to confirm this much was because I uninstalled it from the server and proc usage has dropped as well as no mailstores have randomly dropped for 3 days now…

We will likely install the management for the v.6.0.4.1611 until they either stop supporting it, improve their corporate offering (and support), or we find something better.

We ditched Symantec for the same reason - S.A.V. was an excellent product - worked exactly as needed… Then they released S.E.P. and started refusing to support our older version - S.E.P. was such a worthless piece of C#@P that we were happy to kick it to the curb.

Yorkshire-Wolf · 2012-10-11T19:38:38.000Z

Yeah, maybe compared to some other AV products it is still fairly lightweight, but not on scans. Attached an image of my testing comparison… KES8 modified with everything suggested by Kaspersky, and they think this is acceptable?

KAV6MP4vsKES8Scan.jpg892×520 188 KB

sethgriffith4885 · 2012-10-12T10:55:25.000Z

/sarcasm

Yep that’s acceptable, especially when it’s on a mail server where it should get all the resources instead of you know doing things like serving up e-mail.

0liver · 2012-10-24T18:11:44.000Z

KES8 has been a challange for us aswell, we are now at 1/3 KES8 and 2/3 KAV6. After stopping the roll-out several times because all our XP machines kept randomly BSOD on boot.

After several Mails and suggestions from kaspersky they took the time to look into it and a technican from russia performed a remote debugging session for 5hrs resulting in a custom patch. Which seemed to have solved our problems.

After autopatch_h this is the second patch that was essential to get it running in a OK way. Still it uses abit to much resources on XP SP3 making the systems boot abit slower. In the end KES8 is a complex product and does “more” than KAV6 so, i guess the added load to the system is somewhat justified?

Eventhough KES8 is by far not as great as KAV6 its getting there i guess. KAV6 has a couple of years in patches under its belt!

calimar · 2012-10-24T18:35:13.000Z

Well, we have completely stopped our rollout - KES8 can burn for all I care - the only thing that will stay implemented out of the whole kit will be the new management console. It is ridiculous that we are told that support for KAV 6 is sunsetting when there is no viable product to replace it with.

As for letting a russian engineer do remote troubleshooting on one of our systems - NO WAY! Not that I don’t trust some russians, but some of our clients would fine us out of business if they found that we willingly let anyone that was not a U.S. born person or naturalized citizen on our network in any capacity… I don’t want to have to answer for that.

0liver · 2012-10-25T04:39:16.000Z

As for the remote debugging. Remote debugging was a thing we thought after for a while, since i can completly understand your worries there.

The way its done: You take a PC with windbg hook it up to the problem machine with a serial cable and have the kaspersky guy on the windgb PC via Webex. Just to make sure we are on the same page as of what they are doing.

What we did to minimize the risk for us:

We installed a fresh PC for the windbg session and connected it via an external Internet connection. It was never joined to our domain, never had any of our data on it.
We took a second PC with a base image of our windows, no company data, no company applications, etc. Pretty much naked and installed kaspersky from an usbstick.
While debugging, the “problem” machine was connected only to an external internet connection no connection to our internal LAN.
After debugging and testing a file they provided, that we installed on the problem machine. We earased both systems completly.
Only the official Patch that was send from kaspersky was tested on a test machine and afterwards in the production envoirement.

This was as much as i could think of to make the debugging possible, while still have as much security in the process as possible.

robertfranz3 · 2012-12-11T21:27:12.000Z

I think Kaspersky has jumped the shark.

They still are not fully compatible with Outlook.

Their web site links for product updates are totally dead.

Chat support is a joke - 10 minutes wait for someone to answer - and I still have not received any response beyond the bot greeting.

This would be a good time for a competitor to make me an offer.

calimar · 2012-12-15T18:07:42.000Z

Ditto - one year left on our contract…

I’d be willing to listen to just about anyone EXCEPT Symantec, McAffee, and Trend… They have already screwed me enough in the past.

adamfetter7910 · 2013-02-05T14:47:57.000Z

I am fighting to get a refund. They pushed out an update yesterday that blocked all internet/intranet port 80 and port 443 access. They claim they only blocked port 433. They are releasing a patch in the meantime I was told to disable web antivirus. I am glad that I stopped the rollout when I came across some other issues which were all performance based. Their support team basically had me disable the following features (or lack there of) Application Startup Control, Application Privilege Control, and Vulnerability Monitor. I also had to disable web control as that was causing intermittent web browsing issues. I do not understand how they have a high rating in the Gartner report. The quality of software has degraded significantly over the last three years across multiple industries. I cannot tell you the countless applications that I have tested that act like they just throw code over the wall. It is pretty clear there is no quality process and if there is they definitely are asleep at the wheel.

roelstra · 2013-02-07T04:58:48.000Z

I had Kaspersky dropped in my lap because no one else on the team wanted to deal with it. After 3 weeks of figuring out what is what, and another 3 weeks of testing deployments and a week of production deployments I’ve had about all I’m willing to stand with Kaspersky.

I managed to get around the horrible resource hog that KES 8 is by stripping everything out we didn’t absolutely need and scheduling the scans outside of business hours. The real problems come from the deployments for me. Nothing is installing correctly. I’ve got machines floating around between managed groups for no reason. MAchines not showing that they’ve got the network agent installed when they really do. MAchines with KES installed when they really don’t. Machines just randomly shutting down protection and a reinstall being the only way to get it turned back on.

As far as I’m concerned Kaspersky is crap and I’m taking it to my boss to move to a different A/V solution as soon as I’ve managed to find a decent alternative. I don’t know what kind of contract we’ve got with them but the cost of getting out of it will likely be cheaper than the costs of administering this ridiculous steaming pile.

0liver · 2013-02-08T20:00:04.000Z

Yea KSC9 and KES8 have been Kasperskys version of Windows Vista. Just a couple of Days ago they released KSC10 and KES10. I had to hold parts of my KES8 deployment due to the common problems.

As soon as the licencse Questions are out of the way, i will start testing KSC10 and hope for the best.

KAV6 was like Windows XP great and without any problems.

KES8 was like Windows Vista

KES10 will be like Windows 7, at least i hope so… fingers crossed

coreynice · 2013-02-15T16:27:09.000Z

Wow, I should have read this prior to purchasing Kasperksy.

I performed a 60 day trial (6 machines) and found no problems, but once I rolled it out to our 100+ users…well let’s say the warts starting coming out. All the reviews and independent AV stuff I’ve read, well if they are true, they must be using fast clean machines (not real world.)

Most of my older dual core 2GB win XP machines have choked on this thing for one reason or another. Definitely not what the reviews say about this being the lightest AV on the market. Then when talking to support about it, I’m basically given a shrug when I ask about how to lighten it up. I’m told I can remove the Network agent, but then I’m told I won’t be able to manage the machine. What’s crazy is the minimum requirements for an XP machine is 256MB. But minimum for network agent is 512MB! Support says the minimum is really 1GB!??!! For managed AV? And this stuff is suppose to have the lightest foot print? What were the reviewers looking at?? But, I also have users from two workstation class machines complaining (Hex core, 12GB RAM!)

Summarized list of complaints:
–KS install takes about 20 minutes over a LAN.
–KS needs to reboot constantly. Support’s response? What’s the big deal?
–For some machines, KS makes opening up a PDF file on the network take 3 minutes. Support’s response, exclude PDFs.
–KS admin console is buggie as all get out. (Though I like the idea/layout.) Refresh problems, status updates not what is happening on the machine, constantly having errors that aren’t really there. Support’s response? Microsoft’s problem because it uses the MMC. (Roelstra … feeling your pain … )
–KS support takes a loooonnnnggg time to get too and then the responses are less then stellar (Hearing ya RobertFranz and Shaun Somers!)
–No knowledge base article on how to have a light install, nor does support appear to know how to setup either.

RyanE, I’d love to see how you have it setup, because I have most everything turns off just to make machines useable.

To be fair to KS, I have problems with about 15% of my machines, but what’s most frustrating is, support doesn’t know how to tell me to either lighten up the install or what the root problems are. I mean, I understand ant-virus is complex, but come on, my previous antivirus didn’t have all these problems. I would have definitely stayed with them if I knew what was coming.

I’m really hesitant to try KES 10 at all because I need a breather from all the wasted time on trouble shooting this thing. Not too mention, if I saw it correctly, the minimum requirements are greater than KES 8. If marketing is saying you need more resources… !

I’d love to hear how the roll outs of KES 10 go if you willing.

thomas8820573 · 2013-03-21T15:15:18.000Z

macint2002 Migration to Kaspersky 10 . Recently upgraded KSC 10 KES 10 from KSC 9 and KES 8 on ws and servers… Have three wan locations under one security center. Issues to resolve; Excuse the intentional tag references (may make easier to find)

Note: KES 8 and KES 10 can co-exisit. due to not being able to upgrade all at the same time. If this is the case pay attention to the versions of both the policies, tasks, and packages. For my situation below I was able to push all upgrades out at the same time and had no need for KES 8 policies, tasks, and packages which I deleted only after issues were addressed and moving forward.

KES 10 Kaperskey Endpoint Security 10. One remote branch server failed to ping, rdp, or backup after migration. Found that the firewall/network blocker was causing issue. Policy changes would communicate. Moved to own policy group to further troubleshoot. Worked with tech support and all that was done was to un-check monitored port 443 and add “mstsc.exe” for rdp to the application exclusions. Believed to just exercise the firewall settings may have what I am going to call “jiggled the cord” " as something obviously fubared by not connecting/loading properly (even with reboots)
KSC 10 Kaspersky Security Center 10. Typical, reporting “Not Scanned In A Long Time” for everything. As days moved forward more devices were being reported not being scanned. This is in the task tab of the “Maganaged Computers”. Tech support stated to add “My Computer” to the scan scope. Had already deleted/created tasks several times with no success. Tech emailed me for the record that this is a known bug and they have no fix yet, Although they can be proven to be scanned the console and reports did not reflect the information. My fix, on my own ,was to create the task from the main summary console itself (w/green/red balls). The new task was labeled “Default” scan task unlike other creations (as in create a task directly in the task tab). Can only speculate there was a major fubar with the program code and the console was not seeing the scanned tag correctly in the db for v10.x Low and behold as the buggers complete the scan cycle so did their " not scanned" numbers decrease and the red little computer icon changed to normal. All was well.
Verification process not working ( test a few workstations prior to deploying new virus defs to remaining devices). Recreated task to work.
If any other task doesn’t work and referenced from the main summary console (green/red balls) create/manage the task from there.

Kaspersky Enterprise may be daunting for the newbie, but, that is what your call to tech support is for, do some homework first (internet search or admin manual). So far one client has been brought from through three revs.

Regards. Tommac.