Norton Antivirus: open to hackers

PC World reports that popular anti-virus tools by Symantec - published under the Norton suite of security products - suffers a serious vulnerability.

The vulnerability affects version 10 of Symantec’s enterprise antivirus software, and could lead to Symantec customers being attacked and their systems controlled by a hacker - all without Norton anti-virus noticing.

eEye Digital Security say that normal consumer anti-virus packages should be safe from the flaw, but that Symantec may take weeks to get the vulnerability patched for business users.

The alert helps to demonstrate that simply putting blind faith in security software is no substitute for using common sense and basic security awareness.