Norton Utilities File Shredder Problem

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Norton has a problem with software testing of their 'Norton Utilities Premium' software.  I have tried chatting with their customer support in order to have a simple glaring problem corrected to no avail.  I have even posted the problem to these forums and the only thing that has been done in response to that post is that someone in Norton support has closed that discussion:  https://community.norton.com/en/forums/norton-utilities-file-shredder-problem

I am really beginning to wonder just how competent the software developers and testers at Norton actually are at this point.  I say this because I have had a bit of experience with software development and testing myself.  I spent 20 years providing expertise to the National Security Agency (NSA) in the broad areas of Communications Security (COMSEC) and Signals Intelligence (SIGINT).  During that time, I made significant hardware and software development contributions to the NSA (and other US INTEL agencies) on major COMSEC and SIGINT projects.

Based on that experience I can assure you that weak software testing is not consistent with the goal of strong security.  If you do NOT have a strong software testing regimen in place, you are highly likely to leave holes in that software that an adversary can exploit to their advantage, and to your detriment.  Even simple errors, such as the one that I pointed out in the above-linked post, are a strong indication of a weak software testing regimen. A weak software testing regimen will generally NOT uncover exploitable holes within software --- and those exploitable holes will remain uncorrected.

The fact that Norton has been notified several times of this simple error --- AND HAS DONE NOTHING TO ADRESS IT AS OF THIS TIME --- makes me wonder just how secure their software actually is, and how much protection NORTON actually provides.   Hopefully, this substandard testing regimen is limited to the software group at 'Norton Utilities Premium' and is not an indication of a larger problem within NORTON.   I hope that this problem is addressed SOON, because it is giving NORTON a very big black eye that will continue to fester until the problem is finally corrected.

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peterweb,

Thanks for the info concerning automatic thread closures in this forum.  I was not aware of that, although I knew it was a possible reason.   

I also hope that there is no other software issue than this one.  However, a company that is supposed to pride itself on cyber security should really do a better job of software testing.  As it stands now, I certainly am not getting that proverbial 'warm, fuzzy feeling'.     

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Just an FYI. The above thread was not closed by Norton Support. All forum threads are automatically closed by the forum software after 30 days with no new posts.

All we can do here in the forums is to escalate the issue again. One would hope the at all the actual functionality of the product if fine and just this one gui issue is all that is wrong.