Fergie's Tech Blog

Symantec Issues Bogus Warning of Full-Scale Internet Meltdown

Gregg Keizer writes on ComputerWorld:

Symantec Corp.'s early warning system gave its enterprise customers a brief scare late Friday when it erroneously sent an alert that said an Internet-crippling attack was in progress.

The message, which went out to users of Symantec's DeepSight advanced alert system around 8:40 p.m. EDT, had a subject head that simply read: "DeepSight Increased ThreatCon from 1 to 4 Alert."

ThreatCon uses a 1-through-4 scoring system, with 1 being the least alarming and 4 the most dire, to indicate Symantec's take on the current state of Internet security. According to the company's own definition, Level 4 is tagged as "Full alert" and reserved for those times when "extreme global network incident activity is in progress. Implementation of measures in this Threat Condition for more than a short period probably will create hardship and affect the normal operations of network infrastructure."

posted by Fergie @ 9/22/2007 12:07:00 PM