After admitting that an Indian hacker with his Internet profile name YamaTough managed to obtain the source code for Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0 and Symantec Antivirus 10.2, the company is once again in news saying that some of their Norton products were also leaked as a result of hacking operation that attacked their systems in 2006.

Addressing the claims made by anonymous, regarding the source code disclosure, Symantec made some investigation and came to the conclusion saying that the disclosure was the result of a theft of source code that occurred in 2006. However, after that incident, the company had employed numerous policies and procedures to prevent such incidents and also confessed that no part of the customer information has been impacted or exposed due to these thefts.

Further research by the company indicated that the theft is limited to only the code for the 2006 versions of Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition; Norton Internet Security; Norton SystemWorks (Norton Utilities and Norton GoBack); and pcAnywhere 12.0,12.1,12.5.

Also The Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 product and the Symantec Antivirus 10.2 inherited a very small amount of exposed code. However, the code that has been exposed is so old that current out-of-the-box security settings will suffice against any possible threats that might materialize as a result of this incident.

Due to the age of the exposed source Symantec anti-virus or endpoint security customers – including those running Norton products – should not be in any increased danger of cyber-attacks resulting from this incident. However, their analysis also showed that all pcAnywhere 12.0,12.1,12.5 customers are at increased risk.

Some of the recommendations of the company include:

• Making sure your AV definitions are up to date
• Making sure your software is upgraded to the latest maintenance version
• As it makes sense for your organization, upgrade to the latest version of
• Symantec Endpoint Protection, which is SEP 12.1 RU1. Our analysis shows that the code theft does not require organizations to accelerate an upgrade to SEP 12.1.

And for the people who are using pcAnywhere software they are advising to employ best practices like physical security, endpoint security, network perimeter security, and secure remote access.