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Symantec Hobbles Church Of England
Doug Caverly
Staff Writer
2006-08-03
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Symantec stepped on some holy toes recently when Norton Antivirus "incorrectly identified part of Visual Liturgy," a program used by the Church of England, "as a piece of malware." Users were advised to delete a particular file, and this action effectively killed the software. Whoops.
Thomas Allain-Chapman, Head of Publishing, Church House Publishing, posted a statement about what happened. "Church House Publishing staff immediately reported the issue online to Norton via their established practices as what is known in the industry as a ‘false positive,'" he wrote.
How did the security company respond to the problem? "Symantec will attempt to advise you of our determination regarding your submission within four weeks, depending on completeness of information submitted." Dr. Allain-Chapman was not pleased.
"As far as we are concerned, a response within four weeks was not good enough considering the level of confusion and inconvenience they had caused amongst our customers . . . . The level of indifference that Symantec have shown to the problems that they themselves have caused has left us disappointed and aggrieved."
Dr. Allain-Chapman's statement was written on July 14. An article posted today on ZDNet indicated that the problem is still an issue. According to ZDNet's Tom Espiner, "Symantec claims it responded to CHP's 10 July request a day later but received no further communication from the organization . . . . A Symantec spokeswoman told ZDNet UK, ‘No response was received so two weeks after this initial request, it was concluded that there were no further issues and the case was closed.'"
Even if Church House Publishing dropped the communications ball, the situation indicates a serious goof on Symantec's part.
Tag: Symantec
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About the Author:
Doug is a staff writer for SecurityProNews, InternetFinancialNews, SearchNewz, and WebProNews.
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