I am starting to be a bit concerned about the future of blogs, but there’s no question a blog is the best way to get information out to people quickly, especially if it’s about the Internet, technology or tech-related stuff. It needn’t be a blog, but it needs to share the blog’s most powerful features – speed, easy to use and easy to find, and deliverable by the best mechanism we’ve come across so far: RSS.
Case in point: Symantec, one of the world’s biggest makers of antivirus software, are red-faced after EEye Digital Security revealed on Thursday that it had found a software vulnerability inside Symantec’s Anti-Virus Corporate Edition 10.0. As darkreading says, the vulnerability requires no user intervention and could be used to create a worm. This is an important event, and Symantec need to let their customers, and people in general, know about this as soon as possible. So why is the company’s website making no reference to the exploit, except for a “Symantec Client Security and Symantec AntiVirus Elevation of Privilege”, which cannot mean anything to anybody except the smallest circles (an Elevation of Privilege, is, according to Microsoft, “the process by which a user obtains a higher level of privilege than that for which he has been authorized. A malicious user may use elevation of privilege as a means to compromise or destroy a system, or to access unauthorized information.”)
No mention in the heading of a vulnerability, or a problem with the very software that is used by a lot of people. Unless you really know what you’re looking for, the advisory doesn’t really shed much light on the issue. Nor does Symantec’s main website: While the main page includes a link to the advisory under its Recent News tab on the left of the page, with the less than informative “AntiVirus Notice: Norton Customers Not Affected; Advisory for Corporate Customers”, I could find no press release two days after the vulnerability had been found and been acknowledged by Symantec. The latest Symantec news release is from Wednesday, the day before the vulnerability was found, and there’s nothing there I can find that relates in any way to the issue at hand. This despite there definitely being a statement out there, because eWeek quote a statement from a Symantec spokesman sent to the magazine.
I’m requesting a comment from Symantec to see what they say about this. Apologies if I’ve missed something here, but my feeling is that Symantec need to be very upfront about this kind of thing — a vulnerability in a piece of software its customers rely on to keep out the bad stuff — and to inform readers, journalists, users and investors in a faster, more open and more informative way than they did so far. A blog would be the perfect place to start.
It looks like they’re playing the usual corporate game of being only as upfront as you need to be. And they now have some evidence of action, regardless of how ineffectual, to point to if someone criticizes them of not having done anything to report or address the discovered problem. They’re probably waiting to make a big deal about it until they have a solution ready to deliver 🙂
Or, like many technology companies are starting to become, maybe the insides of the company are just so bloated with do-nothings and window dressers that the people who decide what’s important and what’s not don’t understand how critical the problem is. If that’s the case, I’d be surprised if contacting PR would do much about it.