Category: PIFTS.EXE

Thinking back to PIFTS.EXE.

Paul

Thinking to this very incident looks to something out of the movie “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events“.  I won’t go into much detail but here is what I want answers to about the PIFTS.EXE.  You see after I have read a great article talking in detail about this, I have also come to the conclusion something isn’t right.

[ad#cricket-right-ez]The blog owner known as Anshar in the forums on the Symantec points out some key events. He wanted to point out that the users who were posting were not violating the TOS and was posting questions that look to asking about this file. See screen capture of what I took. This one picture doesn’t prove his theory in whole, but does bring up some suspicions. This actually might be them trying to find a ‘scapegoat’ so to speak. He also talks about what others are asking? What is PIFTS.EXE? People seem to still have not be answered that question.

Although, in Norton’s defense there seems to be a lot of information that they have to sort through. I’ll admit this information people are asking should be really simple to find in the Symantec Databases somewhere. I will not say they are hiding anything major but I do think something is going on that we are not aware of. Here’s some other thoughts to considers? If Norton needed to find out who was using Windows 7, couldn’t they of asked or even made a simple site redirect to find that information, after all anytime you visit a site you have that information sent to the stats. I could in theory find out how many visitors are visiting from Macs and how many are on older systems. That would be very easy to do with Google Analytics.

Now with that said let’s talk about Why it took almost a whole day for them to release a public statement about what happened.  I might be wrong but if I was a stockholder, I’d of demanded them to send that out ASAP instead of waiting 20 to 24 hours.  Although I’m not trying to make any more conspiracy theories, I do think the Streisand effect came into effect and people are feeling like Norton did something they shouldn’t have.  In which case, Norton probably made “A fail whale” attempt of making it better when they started to delete the post.

I’ve been watching the Norton forums trying to make sense of all this, and I do know that Norton have lost people’s faith in them and people are removing their product off there systems if Norton doesn’t start answering questions that need to be answered.

Norton has released the information of PIFTS.EXE and what it does. Although I am sure people are going to argue about what it does or doesn’t. I wanted to post this for people to check out and consider for yourself.

Let’s Clear this up — PIFTS.EXE

Paul6 Replies

I just wanted to clear up some things about PIFTS.EXE.  I read a Most Interesting Article about this over at Bleeping Computers.  He talks about how tested this on his system and I’ll quote:

After reading about this file here and here, I asked around on BleepingComputer.com for one of our users to submit a sample of the file to me. Once I received the file, I ran it on a test box while running a file monitor, to see what it accesses, and Wireshark, to see what it does on the network. What I found was that the program appears to be quite innocent, and from the hostname it connects to, we could have guessed as to what it does. It appears that when you update Norton it connects to stats.norton.com and lets the server know someone has installed an update, what the update was, what program it was for, and whether it was successful. Now, I am not saying that Norton should be contacting one of their servers and reporting this type of information without a user’s permission or even knowledge, but there is no conspiracy theory between Norton, Google, Microsoft, African Nations, and little green men.

[Via Bleeping Computers]

[ad#cricket-right-ez]So Let’s Talk about this a little more, It does connect to stats.norton.com and tell norton that it it has installed the update.  Like he says, I agree although Notron isn’t trying to be the bad guy. I, like everyone else, also thought something was amiss when they started deleting forums post.  Instead of locking them down.  You see it makes them look suspicious and that started a flurry of people posting about this.  I do know they should of been truthful from the get go.  I just heard about this today and wanted to remind people that I meant what I said.  Don’t go overboard because your think your trust with a company was mislead. You know that they have to protect their service to prevent unauthorized access to there software and get what money they deserve.  However They should of been open from the start with this on there main page or in the forums talking about how this happened in the first place.

In Symantec’s defense, when I first heard about this earlier this morning, I noted privately to a couple of folks that some of the comments being left on the Symantec forum bore many of the hallmarks of “4Chan,” (a.k.a. “anonymous”), a virtual community that thrives on playing practical jokes and causing trouble online. The summary about this incident posted to News-for-nerds site Slashdot this morning links to a key 4Chan forum.

[Via Bleeping Computers]

Now they couldn’t say something like this either in there forums as a sticky note or on there Website?  This was why they started to delete the forum threads without telling anyone what happened.  I understand they have the right to delete what they want when they want, it was probably an over zealous moderator.  I wanted to clear this up a little so the virus theories and the conspiracy theories would go away.   I know some website are being over zealous over this and claiming it is doing things it isn’t.  I was just trying to inform but others seemed to run with it and come up with all kinds of theories.  So please let’s take a deep breathe and understand that you have several options as to what you want to do.  I haven’t recommended people removing Norton, and I still don’t recommend removing from your system.  I will always tell people that there is Free versions of Anti-virus and Firewalls available.    Like I said in my previous post these were post made by people on the forums and I was taking screen shots to proof that there was something going on.

I hope this clarify what is going on with Norton Antivirus. I’ll still recommend it for people who can afford it, because it does a good job on anti-virus.

[READ More about this at Symantec]