Symantec Looks Into Claims of Stolen Source Code

wiredmikey writes "A group of hackers claim to have stolen source code for Symantec's Norton Antivirus software. The group is operating under the name Dharmaraja, and claims it found the data after compromising Indian military intelligence servers. So far it's unclear if the claims are a significant threat, as the information posted thus far by the hackers includes a document dated April 28, 1999, that Symantec describes as defining the application programming interface (API) for the virus Definition Generation Service. However, a second post entitled 'Norton AV source code file list' includes a list of file names reputedly contained within Norton AntiVirus source code package. Symantec said it is still in the process of analyzing the data in the second post." Update: 01/06 07:05 GMT by S : In a post to their Facebook page, Symantec has now said some of their source code was indeed accessed, but it was four or five years old.

Comments

Why does the Indian military have the source????

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, so the Indian military works with major US vendors like Norton to spy on their own people (and I assume other countries people since it will be the same source????)

I assume they have the source code so they can insert extra bits and dispatch spyware the next time Norton auto-updates?

You get an auto-update, they get a spyware app into your PC. Is that it?
I don't think the scandal here is that the source code was stolen, it is a scandal that Norton cooperates will military spyware!!

Re:Bleh!

[Spy Handler]

I also use clonezilla alot, and I agree it's a good product in terms of function. But it has the shit-worst user interface ever (for something that's at least moderately popular). Its UI looks like a badly copied version of the text menu from the mid-90's Slackware installer, I swear.

Re:A little perspective

[Lumpy]

And both STILL are garbage. we saw a 200% speed increase on ALL our corperate Windows machines when we switched from SEP to the enterprise offering from ESET. The change was so dramatic that most of us did not believe that the ESET software was running.

Honestly, SEP and Norton both needs to have even more rewrites because it's the joke of the Enterprise world in regards to performance and reliability.