Symantec

For most of the year, employees of leading cyber-security firm Symantec work toward securing and managing their customers’ information.

This week, they took a break from that. They got to be the bad guys.

Four years ago, Symantec launched its annual CyberWar Games, an internal event that challenges employees to walk in the shoes of an attacker. The Games simulates an information security breach modeled after a high profile incident reported in the media, and employees experience the attack from start to finish as the malicious party.

While there’s certainly no shortage of cloud storage solutions to choose from, Norton Zone’s appeal -- on paper at least -- is the security it offers users. Content is encrypted when uploaded and stored in Symantec’s own secure data center, and the service automatically scans files for malware before they can be downloaded. As is fairly typical, you get 5GB of storage for free.

Or rather you did. Symantec has made the decision to discontinue Norton Zone and wind down support of the service over the next 30 to 60 days.

The senior VP of information security at security firm Symantec has said that anti-virus software is “dead”.

“We don't think of anti-virus as a money maker in any way," Brian Dye told the Wall Street Journal.

Security researchers are gradually raising warnings that the Internet of Things will increase, by multitudes, the number of things that can be hacked and attacked.

The Hitchcockian plotlines are endless. Replace The Birds with flying Amazon delivery drones. Or imagine, as researchers did recently at Black Hat, someone hacking your connected toilet, making it flush incessantly and closing the lid repeatedly and unexpectedly.

Symantec has announced that they've successfully taken down a significant part of the ZeroAccess botnet, by exploiting a weakness discovered in its code.

The ZeroAccess botnet has existed in one form or another since 2010, last September, security vendor Sophos reported that the executable for ZeroAccess had been downloaded approximately 9 million times, and Kindsight, a network-based security and analytics vendor, reported that 2.2 million home networks were infected by the botnet as of Q3 2012.

Speaking at the Symantec Symposium in Sydney today, the company's information security practice manager Adrian Covich said that organisations are treating the security of their servers like laptops.

Despite servers residing in the datacentre and having vastly different security challenges, Covich said businesses protect them as if they were end points, like laptops, installing antivirus and data loss prevention packages and ignoring the fact that they are have different challenges.

While Symantec's fiscal first quarter earnings report looked pretty good, the leadership team couldn't avoid questions regarding ongoing layoffs.

To recall, Symantec has had a reorganization plan in place since January with hundreds (if not potentially thousands) of jobs expected to be cut over the course of 2013. During the quarterly conference call on Tuesday afternoon, Symantec CEO Steve Bennett stressed that the blood-letting is almost over at the Mountain View, Calif.-headquartered company:

The day of tech startup acquisitions around the world continues on the security front this afternoon.

Symantec is reportedly acquiring Spanish startup PasswordBank to add more authentication services, according to The Next Web.

Security software vendor Symantec has sacked its Australian tech support team and outsourced the positions to India, as part of a global restructuring campaign.

Symantec announced a company-wide “organisational simplification initiative” in January, emphasising at the time it would be reducing executive and middle management positions, and reorganising its sales department. 

Symantec could let go of as many as 1,700 employees starting as soon as today, according to a report.

The security solutions provider is cutting roughly 8 percent of its global work force in two phases, with about 1,000 positions going first, this month, and another 700 people receiving pink slips in July, AllThingsD reported Thursday, citing unnamed sources.

The layoffs shouldn't come as much of a surprise, as Symantec first talked about the reorganization strategy in January amid its fiscal third-quarter earnings announcement. The big target here is middle management.