Symantec

 Over the past few years, Microsoft has been proactive in trying to shut down criminal botnets that use malware to infect PCs for the use of their illegal activities. So far, the company has conducted operations to take down the Rustock, Kelihos, and Zeus-based botnets, among others.

Today, Microsoft announced yet another takedown of a botnet and this time it worked with antivirus company Symantec to do so. The official Microsoft blog has the details of this new move, called Operation b58, to deactivate the Bamital botnet.

Symantec has quenched fears about a vulnerability in its PGP technology.

According to a Pastebin statement, the pgpwded.sys kernel driver distributed with Symantec PGP Desktop contains an arbitrary memory overwrite vulnerability in the handling of IOCTL 0x80022058.

At the entrance to a nondescript building on the sprawling Symantec campus in Silicon Valley, the company's Senior Director of Operations, Identity and Authentication, Paul Meijer, is presenting his badge and entering his personal identification number to get inside. A second door not far away requires him to repeat the process all over again. A dozen or so feet further is a third door, and this one requires him to press his index finger against a sensor to prove he's one of fewer than 100 Symantec employees permitted to enter.

Hacktivists once again poked fun at Symantec after previously leaked source code for Symantec's Norton Utilities 2006 software was made available as a torrent on Monday. Symantec downplayed the significance of the leak, saying it only involved obsolete code that had already been exposed.

AntiSec tacked a mocking note onto the release of a 52MB file, which was uploaded to The Pirate Bay and other torrent tracker sites on Monday. "Anyhow with this release is nothing really to prove, just stop making shitty software in the name of god! Your [sic] are only killing our CPU's! [sic]"

Symantec has released a new warning after finding that an updated variant of malware Shamoon is in the wild. The new version -- detected by the company as W32.Disttrack -- wipes and destroys files as well as the master boot record (MBR) and changing the active partitions of an infected machine.

The journey to the heart of the operation reminded me of the late '60s TV show "Get Smart," where one heavily fortified door leads to another locked entryway followed by more complicated defenses in a seemingly never ending series of entry points requiring PINs, badges, and irises or fingers scans. I balked at the DNA test. Joking. Actually, I was just along for the exclusive tour, flanked by a group of engineers and executives with high-level security clearances.

Symantec today said it has plugged a hole in its Norton Online Backup service that inadvertently allowed some users to view and access daa of other Norton Online backup customers.

Symantec on Wednesday announces the opening of its first security response center in Southeast Asia, which will focus on monitoring the region's online threat landscape and improve cybersecurity knowledge.

The company said in a statement that the center will boost its regional coverage and allow it to "identify and analyze emerging Internet security threats, deliver protection, and provide informed commentary on new trends observed in cyberattacks".

Under pressure for disappointing financials, Symantec has abruptly replaced its CEO Enrique Salem with chairman Steve Bennett, the company has announced.

Symantec's public statements made almost no attempt to gloss over Salem's upending after a three-year reign in which the company has fallen out of favour, its most recent quarterly profits falling 10 percent year-on-year. Salem had worked for the vendor for almost two decades.

A recent update to Symantec's antivirus software rendered some Windows-based PCs inoperable, the security software maker disclosed Friday.

An update earlier this week to Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.1 antivirus software for businesses caused some Windows XP-based computers to crash repeatedly with a "blue screen of death," the company revealed on its Web site.