3 responses to “The PIFTS Norton conspiracy”

1. 

   Sethness March 11th, 2009 at 12:19

   Good grief.
   The burnt smell coming off Norton today reminds me of the ZoneAlarm 6.0 phone-home fiasco two years ago:

   “ZoneAlarm Security Suite has been phoning home, even when told not to. Last fall, InfoWorld Senior Contributing Editor James Borck discovered ZA 6.0 was surreptitiously sending encrypted data back to four different servers, despite disabling all of the suite’s communications options. Zone Labs denied the flaw for nearly two months, then eventually chalked it up to a “bug” in the software — even though instructions to contact the servers were set out in the program’s XML code.”

   Read all about it:
   http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/01/13/73792_03OPcringley_1.html

   Who will watch the watchmen?

   You’d have to be nuts to trust ZoneAlarm or Norton: They create a phone-home, fail to catch it in pre-release trials of the firewall (did they even try?), and actively do a cover-up. That’s not security *for you*. That’s security *for them, at your expense*.

2. 

   Bob Primak March 11th, 2009 at 13:09

   Even if this issue had not surfaced, Neil Rubenking of PC Magazine is investigating reports that Symantec/Norton techs in India are ripping off Live Chat customers and using unauthorized non-Symantec software in Remote Assist sessions. Pretty scary stuff!

   http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2342634,00.asp

   Title: “Symantec Support Goes Rogue”

   And that’s from one of the biggest cheerleaders for Norton products on the Internet.

3. 

   Bob Primak March 11th, 2009 at 15:18

   The Conspiracy Theory about those posts to the Symantec Forums is pure FUD. See the PC Magazine News Story which clears up the entire PIFTS episode. It was an innocent programmer oversight regarding not digitally signing or assigning permissions to a normal Norton update.

   http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2342809,00.asp

   Norton products have always phoned home constantly (it’s called Live Update), which is one reason why I removed them from my laptop a couple of years ago.