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Security Threat Changing, Says Symantec CEO

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the moving-target dept.

narramissic writes "At the Symantec Vision event in Tokyo Thursday, chairman and CEO John Thompson spoke about a shift his company has observed in the threat posed to computer users and companies by hackers. 'While a few years ago many people were much more focused on attacking the machine and attacking the broad-based activities that were going on online, now all of a sudden we've noticed a significant shift in both the type of attack and the motivation of the attack,' he said. 'The attacks that we see today are more targeted and more silent and their objective is to create true financial harm as opposed to visibility for the attackers.'"

2 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Heh by daeg · · Score: 2, Funny

    CEO: Quick! Vista is too secure and our products are too badly written to rewrite them for Vista. We need a new business model!
    Marketing Department: There's this... threat, yeah, threat... to like, businesses. They have a lot of money... maybe we can sham them for a few more years?
    CEO: Brilliant!

  2. Boy he's right about that! by Illserve · · Score: 2, Funny

    The new security threat is from Symantec products!

    It's preloaded on new computers and there's nothing you can do to prevent it. Once you get the computer, it begs you to install it, if you do, god help you. If you change your mind about using norton, well... you've got a long night ahead of you, crack open a bottle of wine and fire up regedit.

    And if you don't uninstall it, and let it lapse, it'll be peppering you with "renew norton!" for the next thousand years. Ditto with McAffee.

    These cures are worse than the disease. At least a zombied computer isn't spitting up "Renew NOW" dialog boxes.