Just when you thought the story behind the stolen Symantec source code hit the ultimate level of crazy, the bar gets raised a little higher.On Monday, an email thread posted on Pastebin revealed that a hacker named Yamatough attempted to extort $50,000 from Symantec to prevent the release of stolen source code; however, the following day, Anonymous took to Twitter to say that the hacker(s) didn’t try to extort Symantec, but Symantec tried to bribe the hackers!
https://twitter.com/#!/YourAnonNews/status/166898121341804544
As if that statement isn’t mind boggling enough, a tweet by AnonymousIRC seems to backtrack on the idea of bribery and favor the extortion attempt by saying that Symantec got trolled and that the code was always destined for a public release:
https://twitter.com/#!/AnonymousIRC/status/166957537676099585
So, which is it?
Did Yamatough offer to settle the score without releasing the stolen source code for a cool $50k or was it Symantec that originally stepped up and dangled the green in front of the hacker in hopes of shutting them up?
Whatever the case may be, the source code for pcAnywhere has been released and the hackers are still sitting on the source code for other Symantec products.
Users who depend on Symantec’s antivirus and security products for protection should seriously consider switching vendors to avoid being hit by a 0-day exploit thanks to the release of Symantec source code.
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