Anonymous Hackers Release Norton AntiVirus 2006 Source Code
Hackers associated with Anonymous published the source code for Symantec’s Norton AntiVirus 2006 on The Pirate Bay late Thursday evening, according to Zach Wittaker at ZDNet.
The 1.07 GB download file includes the source code to a number of products within the software, including the consumer version, the corporate edition as well as other files for Windows, Unix and NetWare.
According to Dave Neal at The Inquirer, Symatec released this statement today:
“Symantec is aware of the claims made by Anonymous that it has recently posted source code for the 2006 version of Norton Antivirus. We are still in the process of analyzing the code to confirm its authenticity,” it said.
“As we have already stated publicly, this is old code, and Symantec and Norton customers will not be at an increased risk as a result of any further disclosure related to these 2006 products.”
The source code— which is the most precious asset to a software maker’s intellectual property– was stolen in 2006. Hackers have been releasing snippets periodically and even tried negotiating a ransom.
Symatec did not know at the time of the breach that the hackers had actually obtained source codes and still don’t know the full extent of the codes that were hacked.
On February 6 a hacker published the full code for Symatec’s pcAnywhere program, which is a remote access program that lets administrators get into computers to troubleshoot and also allows mobile users on the road to access content on their office desktop.
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