Like cats and mice, security product vendors and cyber-criminals do not care much for each other. Over the past 24 hours, however, cyber-criminals may have just about fallen in love with Symantec, which made a mistake that let crooks launch a flood of malware on the Internet. It all began when Symantec issued a diagnostic patch, PIFTS.exe, that was not digitally signed. This triggered firewall alerts and queries from puzzled and frightened users to the Symantec forum. Symantec began deleting posts on the forum, and users began accusing it of censorship and coming up with conspiracy theories.
Symantec depends heavily on computer OEMs to pre-install their products on new PCs; since there are at least two free-to-home-users anti-virus products (Avast and AVG) that are rated as superior to Symantec's paid-subscription offering, it's unlikely that any reasonably-savvy user will keep the inferior product, but those who don't know any better will pony up, and as a result, will find themselves suffering the consequences - as this latest PR disaster demonstrates.
The "little" mistake was the coding error that caused the problem. The big mistake was deleting the posts from the forum.
"Symantec began deleting posts in the Norton Users Forum because they were abusing the forum's terms of service, Symantec staff member Dave Cole said."
My posts were one of the hundreds if not thousands which were deleted and I can assure everyone that my posts did not violate the TOS. David Cole's statement continues to damage the company because it is simply not true. Why were all the posts that did not violate the TOS deleted?
Now, even days after the event, they still haven't come clean and apologized. Instead they continue to blame it on "spammers".
Norton needs to review PR 101 and take the responsibiliy. Trust is their business and the company has failed miserably.
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Symantec Bungle Unleashes Torrent of Spam, Confusion
Posted by: Richard Adhikari March 11, 2009 11:59 AMLike cats and mice, security product vendors and cyber-criminals do not care much for each other. Over the past 24 hours, however, cyber-criminals may have just about fallen in love with Symantec, which made a mistake that let crooks launch a flood of malware on the Internet. It all began when Symantec issued a diagnostic patch, PIFTS.exe, that was not digitally signed. This triggered firewall alerts and queries from puzzled and frightened users to the Symantec forum. Symantec began deleting posts on the forum, and users began accusing it of censorship and coming up with conspiracy theories.
"Symantec began deleting posts in the Norton Users Forum because they were abusing the forum's terms of service, Symantec staff member Dave Cole said."
My posts were one of the hundreds if not thousands which were deleted and I can assure everyone that my posts did not violate the TOS. David Cole's statement continues to damage the company because it is simply not true. Why were all the posts that did not violate the TOS deleted?
Now, even days after the event, they still haven't come clean and apologized. Instead they continue to blame it on "spammers".
Norton needs to review PR 101 and take the responsibiliy. Trust is their business and the company has failed miserably.