Like cats and mice, security product vendors and cyber-criminals do not care much for each other. Over the past 24 hours, however, cyber-criminals may have just about fallen in love with Symantec, which made a mistake that let crooks launch a flood of malware on the Internet. It all began when Symantec issued a diagnostic patch, PIFTS.exe, that was not digitally signed. This triggered firewall alerts and queries from puzzled and frightened users to the Symantec forum. Symantec began deleting posts on the forum, and users began accusing it of censorship and coming up with conspiracy theories.
