Hacker group Anonymous claimed late Monday that the source code of Symantec's pcAnywhere had been uploaded on The Pirate Bay site. Symantec
could not immediately comment on whether the hackers had indeed
released the source code of its product. "It happened so recently that
we're still in the process of analyzing and won't be able to confirm
until the morning," a spokesman said via email. Earlier on Monday, an email string posted on Pastebin
referred to negotiations over payment for the source code between one
Sam Thomas, purported to be a Symantec employee, but using a Gmail mail
id, and a person named Yamatough. The name of the hacker is similar to
the Twitter handle of YamaTough in Mumbai
who is associated with the hacker group, Lords of Dharmaraja, that had
earlier claimed it had access to the source code of some Symantec
products.
"We will pay you $50,000.00 USD total," Thomas said in
an e-mail earlier this month. He however wanted assurances that the
hacker would not release the code after payment, and offered to pay
$2,500 a month for the first three months, with payments starting the
next week.
"After the first three months you have to convince us
you have destroyed the code before we pay the balance. We are trusting
you to keep your end of the bargain," he added. Yamatough
rejected the offer stating that "our offshore people wont let us
securely get the money because they wont process amounts less than 50k a
shot". By late Monday, Yamatough gave Symantec 10 minutes to
decide which way it would go. "After that two of your codes fly to the
moon PCAnywhere and Norton Antivirus totaling 2350MB in size (rar)," the
hacker said. "We can't make a decision in ten minutes. A We need more
time," Thomas replied. A
Symantec said the offer of $50,000 to the hacker was part of a law enforcement investigation. The
company did not however disclose the name of the investigative agency.
"Given that the investigation is still ongoing, we are not going to
disclose the law enforcement agencies involved and have no additional
information to provide," the company said in a statement.
Symantec
said that in January an individual claiming to be part of Anonymous
attempted to extort a payment from Symantec in exchange for not publicly
posting stolen Symantec source code they claimed to have in their
possession. "Symantec conducted an internal investigation into this
incident and also contacted law enforcement given the attempted
extortion and apparent theft of intellectual property," it added. Symantec admitted in January
that its network was compromised and source code stolen, according to
reports, backing away from earlier claims that a third party had been
attacked.
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