Researcher: 200,000 PCs Vulnerable to PCAnywhere Exploit
As many as 200,000 systems connected to the Internet could be hijacked by hackers exploiting bugs in Symantec's pcAnywhere, including up to 5,000 running point-of-sale programs that collect consumer credit card data, a researcher said today.
The revelations came just four weeks after Symantec took the unprecedented step of telling pcAnywhere users to disable or uninstall the program because attackers had obtained the remote access software's source code.
Several days later, Symantec said it had patched all the known vulnerabilities in pcAnywhere, but declined to declare that the product was safe to use. According to Rapid7, which prowled the Web looking for pcAnywhere systems, an estimated 150,000-to-200,000 PCs are running an as-yet-unpatched copy of the Symantec software, and are thus vulnerable to be hijacked by remote attacks, which could commandeer the machine's keyboard and mouse, and view what's on the screen.
