It might only have been fool’s gold at Kg Melayu Johor but not at the Indian intelligence military servers where hackers stumbled upon ‘gold’.
The latest, and probably biggest shock for end IT consumers was probably the recent leak of Symantec’s popular Norton anti-virus source code on Pastebin – a popular web-based sharing tool for software developers.
Most interesting fact from this news was that the leak was due the uncontrollable, ‘human factor’ risk that IT security vendors themselves have been preaching BEWARE! about all these years.
It starts out something like this:
“No single security solution can guarantee a 100% protection of your network, application or system in use. Despite the superiority of any IT security <Brand X> is, there is still the element of human error that the best IT vendors cannot insure you from.”
In this case, the Lords of Dharmaraja hackers didn’t even have to rely on human error to achieve their objective. They were probably just fooling around Indian military servers without serious intent to hack, and stumbled upon highly prized proprietary Norton anti-virus source code just sitting there.
A typical case of utter carelessness.
Whilst Symantec reaffirmed that its property is not affected ie. the leaked codes are of outdated older Norton versions, it is still an embarrassing situation for the prolific security market leader as the secret of their flagship product is now available to both malware programmers and rivals companies to analyze.
Meanwhile, many Symantec faithful were jolted to their senses that even the brand responsible to secure their basic computers could be so easily compromised.
It’s like hearing that the family doctor caught a cold because he forgot to put on an extra shirt.
IT BYTES BACK! says: Another case in point is that explosive dynamites are unnecessary to blow up the sturdiest strongholds when going around the fence is all that is required.
