There are some nights when you’re up late with your nose in a text book, cramming for midterms… and you stumble upon some delicious e-conspiracies!

Oh, dear, sweet Internet, you’ve given me yet another reason to utterly loathe Symantec. I’d heard rumors in the past about them manufacturing viruses, which I honestly don’t doubt (though obviously I make no claims either way. I’ve yet to see proof.)… If there were no viruses, then the Anti-Virus companies would be out of business. Let’s face it, the bulk of the hackers on the net are Grey Hat. If you run into something malicious, nine times out of ten you were sticking your nose where you probably shouldn’t have been, and you picked up something nasty (much like the college dating scene – Ewwww, I went there).

There’s a curious process that is apparently part of some update… but it’s sending the personal information of Norton AV users to Africa? The details are hazy, mostly because Symantec seems to be desperately deleting anything related to the mystery. As I’m rapidly F5ing, I keep seeing even innocent inquiries about PIFTS.EXE get threads banned and accounts on the Norton forums deleted. The longest lasted about four minutes and contained almost no information.

The /b/tards have their hands on it, but love them or hate them, Anonymous is good at getting information out there. It will be interesting what this corporation has to say for itself.

It’s one of those moments where it feels good to be the media. This isn’t libel, this is me reporting what I’m observing.

So… the question is, what do you have to hide, Symantec? If PIFTS.EXE isn’t a huge deal, why don’t you just explain yourselves? Bad business, mates. In your line of work, there IS such a thing as bad publicity. ;)

Since the sun is starting to rise and I’ve got studying to do, I refer you to the following links so that you can follow this bizarre conspiracy theory as well:

Open discussion on the conspiracy theory

Conspiracy theories run rampent due to PIFTS.EXE

Norton forums (you’ll see that any PIFTS.EXE threads quickly die.)

From Yahoo! Answers: Anyone know what PIFTS.exe is?

Discussion on the Zone Alarm Forums ( <3 ZA, personally... )

Analysis of PIFTS.exe from Anubis (A service which states that it will analyze all Windows executable files)

An Internet acquaintance of mine had the following to say:

“Both of my threads about pifts were deleted and I was banned from Norton. The first directly mentions pifts and what it does. Deleted and banned after 2 minutes. The second mentioned some af4sd4.exe or whatever that accessed two foriegn IP addresses, (Both which pifts attempts to access), and a bunch of other things, Like causing popups and slowing my computer down in general. This thread was immediately deleted and I was banned. The second thread did not mention pifts in any way short of mentioning the IP’s it connects to.”

Curiouser and curiouser…

What I find most interesting is that Symantec employees allegedly seem to be working via other websites to also suppress information. Rest assured, if I find anything concrete, I’ll be publishing it here. Freedom of the press is a glorious thing, indeed.

Peace,
Aubrey Ramsdell
Torch News Editor

Tags: Anti-virus, Conspiracy, Norton, PIFTS.EXE, Symantec, Virus

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 5:36 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.