Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Bad Symantec Update: WHO WAS PHONE?

Around 7:30 p.m. Pacific Time, Symantec noticed that its Norton support forums were being flooded with blank messages that had PIFTS.exe in their subject line. Within three hours there were 600 posts about PIFTS.exe. The posts contained no text, only subjects such as "IF PIFTS.EXE WAS HERE, THEN WHO WAS PHONE?" and "OH GOD YOU GOT CHOCOLATE IN MY PIFTS."

Symantec began deleting the messages, assuming they were from spammers.


Read the rest of the CSO story here.

2 comments:

Pete Warden said...

I've been following this story, and the angle that spammers spontaneously started posting to the forums seems a bit unbelievable. Having worked at a large company, the idea that someone panicked and started deleting posts first seems more plausible.

Here's an account by somebody involved on the forums:
http://www.freebase.org/

Michael Wade said...

Pete,

Thanks for the information!