Wednesday, 26 September 2007

Symantec Warns of Internet meltdown; Accidentally

Once in a while, there comes news that can change people’s happiness into gloom, though the damage is done before the folly is realised....

Once in a while, there comes news that can change people’s happiness into gloom, though the damage is done before the folly is realised. It recently happened when computer security company Symantec inadvertently warned enterprise customers of a full-scale Internet meltdown.

An erroneous alert from Symantec's DeepSight falsely warned that a devastating attack was underway. The message contained a subject line that stated: "DeepSight Increased ThreatCon from 1 to 4 Alert."

The ThreatCon scale runs from one to four (meltdown).

Symantec, based on the patterns of attacks it monitors decides the mark. Symantec has never issued a genuine ThreatCon 4 alert and has only once ramped up the scale to ThreatCon 3.