09.13.09
Gemini version available ♊︎Symantec Fails to Understand Security?
Summary: Symantec almost accuses Google of merely hosting USENET content that may contain arbitrary binaries
BACK in April we wrote about the ongoing battle against USENET. Some companies wish to eliminate USENET because it enables Free speech, being a decentralised medium like P2P or torrent. Others worry that it negatively impacts their artificial scarcity-based business models.
“Some companies wish to eliminate USENET because it enables Free speech, being a decentralised medium like P2P or torrent.”Either way — and although it is probably unrelated to any of the above — one informant/reader shows us this warming, remarking that it’s a “slow day at Symantec”. Yes, Symantec titles it “Google Groups Trojan.”
“This is BS,” he writes. “Who in their right minds downloads and runs a DLL from Usenet?”
There is another curious article in Wired Magazine which somehow connects Da Vinci Code (the book, nothing to do with source code) to Windows malware. It turns out that lovers of the book may find themselves in trouble, but only if they use Microsoft Windows and search the Web.
But on Wednesday morning the top Google search result for “death star research” — the logical query — would bring you no closer to unraveling the Lost Symbol mystery. Instead, it produced a malicious website that uses pop-ups, mouse-trapping and a well-executed fake virus scan to trick you into installing a Windows executable that will screw up your computer pretty badly.
If Symantec calls Google Groups (or USENET) a threat because it may contain some downloadable malware (added by posters of zeros and ones), then why not generalise and say that this whole “Internet thing” is a massive case of malware? Let’s just throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? █
“Our products just aren’t engineered for security.”
–Brian Valentine, Microsoft executive
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