Symantec Recommends Turning off pcAnywhere
January 26, 2012
USM, as part of a UMS-wide contract uses Symantec for anti-virus protection. This is a great agreement and provides free anti-virus to all our students, faculty, and staff at work and at home. Even though we do not use pcAnywhere, our staff felt the severity of the problem and the unprecedented response from Symantec warranted us passing it along to the community. What follows is from a Computerworld post on the current issue.
Threatened by Anonymous, Symantec tells users to pull pcAnywhere’s plug
Source code leaked years ago, but now Anonymous hacking group has
software in its sights
By Gregg Keizer
January 26, 2012 06:44 AM ETComputerworld – Symantec this week took the highly unusual step of
telling users of its pcAnywhere remote access software to disable or
uninstall the software while it fixes an unknown number of bugs.Security experts said the move was unprecedented for a company of
Symantec’s size.“This is the first time I have seen a company of Symantec’s scale tell
their customers to stop using a shipping product, especially one that
many users depend on for remote access,” said HD Moore, chief technology
officer of Rapid7, and the creator of the popular Metasploit penetration
testing toolkit.“It’s certainly a new precedent for a security breach,” added Andrew
Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security. “Talk about
dirty laundry getting aired.”Symantec’s recommendation was blunt.
“At this time, Symantec recommends disabling the product until we
release a final set of software updates that resolve currently known
vulnerability risks,” the company in a statement Wednesday.pcAnywhere lets users remotely access and control other computers, such
as an office PC from a notebook while on the road.–
