Norton Internet Security / Norton AntiVirus

[Tony_Weiss]

Hi everyone,

No doubt you've read the Official Statement about PIFTS.EXE and the reasons why many posts were removed from this forum. There was no "conspiracy" or "cover-up" - someone was spamming our forums, and we took action to remove these posts. As it increased over a few hours, many threads were removed, and several users were denied access to post in the forums. We were gathering information to distribute, and I'm sorry it took this long to post the info to everyone.

After reviewing some of the emails I've received, it appears that some posts were removed in error, as well as the access of some users. If you feel your access was removed in error, please contact me directly (my email address is listed on my user profile) and I will restore your access to the forums. I apologize for this inconvenience, and thank you for your patience while we deal with this difficult situation. Thank you also to the users who have helped us identify the malicious posts to this forum, it was a big help.

For the sake of keeping the PIFTS.EXE questions consolidated, please feel free to post all your questions/comments about PIFTS.EXE to this thread. Please do not post to a new thread, as we wish to keep all posts in one area. Before you post, please review our official statement for answers to your questions. Thanks again for your understanding with this difficult issue.

EDIT: The technical details of PIFTS.EXE have been posted to the official statement. Thanks!

Message Edited by Tony_Weiss on 03-10-2009 11:03 PM

[chaos1986]

pifts.exe has something 2 do with the history and for some unknown reason google. It sends data to mircosoft and somewhere in africa

whats with this Norton is supposed 2 be a trusted company, my uncle works for the MOD and uses the latest and best Norton security at home (where he works on sensitive secure data online). If Norton are installing odd things onto peoples computers they should stop

[ConfusedBoy]

Thank you Mr. Cole!

I'm glad that everything has been resolved.  I didn't know what was happening.  But now my faith in Symantec has been restored.

[Whistleblower09]

Why does Symantec hate freedom and privacy?

[TomiRed]

Sure, this was not a 'conspiracy or cover-up' but it was a major PR ****up you should've handled better.

Unfortunately I've started a thread already, please merge it if you can.

You let the 4chan-s get the better of you, create a whole hullabaloo, how could you let that happen? It is incompetent, not only on the technical side, but even more on the PR side.

Message Edited by TomiRed on 03-10-2009 09:00 PM

[TomiRed]

..which was just announced, it is way, waay overdue.

This kind of post should've been published hours ago. When you got the likes of Security Fix  interested in your botched info-update, then you should know you PR skills aren't worth much.

Seriously, if someone like Krebs hadn't started to inquire about this, would you have even posted that?

Get a grip, Jesus Christ, you should be better at this.

[ShuttleXpC]

There was the official statement, but you still do NOT tell us what this thing does? All you said was it wasn't signed. So, can you please not stall and tell us exactly what this thing does?

[TomiRed]

The thing tells Symantec how many 2006 and 2007 Norton product line installations remain operational out there, that's what I gathered and it seems logical, because keys are transfered from the old to the new ones..

But don't you (Symantec techies) have SKU numbers or some ID numbers for that? 

[Whistleblower09]

Anubis analysis of PIFTS.exe

 Why does PIFTS.exe access Temporary Internet Files and History of Internet Explorer? Is this "protective" in any sense? Why have we not been told what this "diagnostic patch" actually does?

[ShuttleXpC]

I see, thank you. If they would have simply made a one line statement in patch notes this could have all been avoided ._.;

Lots of people here were asking for patch notes, and waiting until everyone has the patch to release them seems like a very silly idea (I bet even moreso now). Hopefully you guys will take a lesson from this and make a simple patch notes list that details the changes made so people don't freak out.