http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10192899-83.html By Elinor Mills Security News.com March 10, 2009 Symantec released a diagnostic patch for some of its older Norton products on Monday night that did not identify its origin and thus triggered alerts on user firewalls, the company said Tuesday. The patch for 2006 and 2007 versions of Norton Internet Security and Norton Antivirus, a program dubbed "PFST.exe," (Product Information Framework Trouble Shooter) was distributed to collect anonymous statistics on matters such as how many computers are using the products and what operating system they are running, Jeff Kyle, group product manager for Symantec consumer products, said Tuesday. Because it was unsigned--a result of human error--firewalls started prompting users with messages asking them if they trust the patch, Kyle said. Of course, because the patch had no signature indicating it was from Symantec, users didn't know whether to trust it and many of them went to the Norton user forum for answers. The company pulled the patch after three hours and then unwittingly laid the groundwork for conspiracy theorists after it started deleting forum posts related to the matter. The company was not censoring the posts, but fighting off a spam attack, according to Kyle. [...] _______________________________________________ Best Selling Security Books and More! http://www.shopinfosecnews.org/Received on Wed Mar 11 2009 - 00:07:41 PDT
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