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Symantec Stock Tanks After Announcing An Internal Probe (cnet.com)

An anonymous reader quotes CNET: Symantec shares plummeted roughly 20% on Thursday after the antivirus maker warned an internal investigation could delay its annual report. The plunge followed news that the audit committee of Symantec's board had launched an internal investigation into undescribed concerns raised by a former employee. The probe is being aided by independent counsel and other advisers, the company said in its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report. Symantec said it had informed the US Securities and Exchange Commission of the probe and intends to share information collected during the investigation with the commission.
CRN reports that the investigation "is not tied to any security concern or breach around Symantec's products or systems, Cynthia Hiponia, vice president of investor relations, said during the company's earnings call Thursday."

34 comments

  1. About time by Vranitzky · · Score: 4, Funny

    Symantec is still around? I remember the days in which if you wanted to fix a computer, the first thing was 'uninstall Norton antivirus' ðY

    1. Re:About time by BeauHD+(5) · · Score: 0

      Yes, it is required by BizX, on all computers

    2. Re:About time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You needed to do that with any AV to avoid having your repair tools blocked. Yeah I get that you were just picking the low-hanging fruit of [insert software here] being useless, etc, but still...

    3. Re:About time by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Informative

      You needed to do that with any AV to avoid having your repair tools blocked. Yeah I get that you were just picking the low-hanging fruit of [insert software here] being useless, etc, but still...

      Nope. Normally you just disable it. But NAV/SAV is extra-bad garbage. Even the corporate edition would just stop updating itself last time I had to deal with it. Also, their detection rate has never been very good.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    4. Re:About time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not just to run your tools. Removing symantec would make it feel to the user that you doubled their RAM and Processor speed. That software is such a resource pig. Though I guess symantec has been topped these days. Just about any Java developed web app is even more of a resource pig these days. It's shocking when you actually see a typical production java web app these days just how much RAM it can gobble up.

    5. Re:About time by thomst · · Score: 3, Insightful

      drinkypoo opined:>/p>

      NAV/SAV is extra-bad garbage. Even the corporate edition would just stop updating itself last time I had to deal with it. Also, their detection rate has never been very good.

      I'll go farther than that:

      Symantec's anti-virus products ARE malware.

      They slow your machine down to a crawl. They interfere with basically any utility program you try to run. They prevent you from uninstalling THEM, if you let 'em. They keep you from being able to install all kinds of other software. They spy on you. And they're constantly trying to extort you into paying to extend your slavery to them, by pretending that something WORSE THAN SYMANTEC will happen to your computer, if you don't ...

      --
      Check out my novel.
    6. Re:About time by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      https://www.symantec.com/conne...
      Could it be that the AV fixed some computers too good?

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    7. Re:About time by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      I had to do that last year to fix a point-of-sale machine for a friend. So sad. So so sad.

    8. Re:About time by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      The tragic thing is that around 2007 they released a good version. Installed quietly, didn't nag, protected you from genuine threats.

      It must not have made them much money because within a couple of years it was back to being bloated, whiney crap that nagged you to give it more money constantly.

      Good AV software is apparently unprofitable.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    9. Re:About time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is still the case.

    10. Re:About time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Really? AV-Comparatives usually has them in the top 10 of the several dozen AV suites they test.

    11. Re:About time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Which required roughly half an hour digging it out of the registry.

    12. Re:About time by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Really? AV-Comparatives usually has them in the top 10 of the several dozen AV suites they test.

      Then they are at best incompetent, and should not be trusted. Spend some time with that shit, you'll hate it too.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    13. Re: About time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

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  2. Heh, heh heh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    He said internal probe Heh, hehehe

    1. Re:Heh, heh heh... by flemflam · · Score: 1

      Third Post

  3. Are they stocking water tanks or tanks with guns? by jaa101 · · Score: 0

    Don't you just love it when the extreme abbreviation required for headlines makes it ambiguous and it takes you three or more reads to figure out what they meant? Or am I the only one who was confused by this one? In my defence, as a non-American, I'm not that used to "tank" as a verb. Verbing weirds language.

  4. Re:Are they stocking water tanks or tanks with gun by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    As an American I had no trouble with it. Here company names are treated as singular nouns. So if the headline were actually describing the fact that Symantec as a company was stocking tanks, it would be worded "Symantec stocks tanks". The fact that there was no "s" immediately signifies that it's referring to Symantec's stock, not the act of stocking. Also, the phrase "tanking stocks" and the many variations are commonly used here, almost exclusively, if not totally exclusively, in reference to stocks on the stock market.

  5. Re:Are they stocking water tanks or tanks with gun by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    As a Brit, my first thought was that they were getting military vehicles, perhaps because the probe might provoke violence.

    Clearly that's silly, when you reflect on it. I'm sure there are whole websites devoted to ambiguous headlines, and I'm pretty certain some of them are deliberately written that way either for publicity or just 4 lulz.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  6. Re: Trump's going to get an internal probe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You're embarrassing yourself, Shlomo

  7. Re:Are they stocking water tanks or tanks with gun by Xuranova · · Score: 2

    I think it might be a cultural/country thing. As a US citizen (but also as a person who is into finance) the headline made sense to me. When a stock goes down a noticeable amount, 'plummets' or 'tanks' are often the verbs used to describe it.

    --
    "There is no real right or wrong, just what the majority accepts at the time."
  8. Re:Are they stocking water tanks or tanks with gun by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They are stocking tanks with internal probes on them, obviously.

  9. So therefore... by neo-mkrey · · Score: 1

    ...it is tied to a security concern and/or breach.

    1. Re:So therefore... by mccalli · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Money. It's going to be tied to money. If it's delaying the annual report, I would guess its going to be some accounting concern.

    2. Re:So therefore... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The story did warn that a result of the probe could be restated financials ... or in the worst case "management fallout"...

  10. Symantec bad by Spazmania · · Score: 1

    Symantec revoked our SSL cert last week. It didn't expire. They didn't ask. They just published a revocation and suddenly, unexpectedly, our web site could not be reached.

    They can burn.

    --
    Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
    1. Re: Symantec bad by Vranitzky · · Score: 1

      Symantec has been bad since before written history began. You can read bad reviews of it in Aristotle :-D

    2. Re:Symantec bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That is totally unrelated now. Symantec sold the SSL certificate business:

      Symantec Selling SSL Security Business to DigiCert for $950M

      And since it isn't obvious from the article, I'll point out that FY18 for Symantec started in April 2017, so Q3FY18 ended at the end of calendar year 2017.

      If you go to their web site, it already has been updated to say the SSL certificate service is being provided by DigiCert (in the fine print at the bottom) and that DigiCert is licensing the Symantec brand name for this particular service.

  11. Re: Are they stocking water tanks or tanks with gu by Vranitzky · · Score: 1

    To tank is a perfectly fine verb in English. I'm not a native speaker, but I've seen that verb countless times. I only realised the headline could be interpreted as 'stocking military tanks' after reading these comments. Maybe it's because Slashdot is anyhow mostly about finance/law/copyright/Apple?

  12. Experiences by Not-a-Neg · · Score: 1

    My experience working at Symantec (damn near 20 years ago) was that the Gen-X'ers in management were taking 3 hour lunches at Olive Garden while spending the rest of their time in the office chatting about their personal lives rather than doing any actual work. The IT department was a room that the neckbeards tried to keep the door closed to, while the Gen-X'ers detested the obese ragged appearance of the techs (little has changed in that regards today.)

    My experience in IT at a place that used the corporate edition of Symantec's anti-virus product was that it regularly failed to update itself and was very reliable at detecting virus infections, but only after the virus had finished dropping its payload. I championed removing Symantec and giving users 30% of the performance of their machines back, but management was living in fear of the Sarbanes-Oxley boogeyman. We always ended up using MalwareBytes to clean the machines which would have been a better investment.

    --
    -==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!