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US Government Issues Stern Warning to Patch Symantec and Norton Security Products

· 2 min read

US Government Issues Stern Warning to Patch Symantec and Norton Security Products

 A couple of weeks ago news came out that several of Symantec products were littered with security holes. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) via U.S.-CERT issued an alert this week to users about these very serious flaws that if exploited “could allow a remote attacker to take control of an affected system.”

Patches for all of the vulnerabilities have been made available by Symantec and should be applied right away. Because it was a period of time between when they were made public and when the company was able to release fixes, there was plenty of time for cyber criminals to do damage. So don’t give them more opportunity and make sure you apply the updates now.

More information can be found by looking up the following CVE numbers:

  • CVE-2016-2207
  • CVE-2016-2208
  • CVE-2016-2209
  • CVE-2016-2210
  • CVE-2016-2211
  • CVE-2016-3644
  • CVE-2016-3645
  • CVE-2016-3646

As a recap, Security researcher, Tavis Ormandy with Google’s “Project Zero” discovered them and reported them to Symantec in April. He considered them “as bad as it gets.” After all, Symantec is the fifth most popular anti-malware product according to OPSWAT’s “Anti-malware Vendor and Encryption Product Market Share Report” with over 6% of market share. It’s not unreasonable for people to trust their products. It’s in millions of businesses and homes worldwide.

Don’t delay and make sure to update those systems now. exploitation of these vulnerabilities, but because of the “ease of attack, widespread nature of the products, and severity of the exploit,” it may make these popular targets.knownThese affect several Symantec and Norton products on Windows, OSX, and Linux operating systems, which covers about everyone using them. The government warning did state that there is no

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