Symantec offered hacker group $50,000 to keep the source code private

Symantec has placed a $50,000 goodie bag forward for the hacker group who managed to gain access to PCAnywhere and Norton Antivirus code, hoping that the amount would be enough to placate them from putting forward the source code for the mentioned software. There was an e-mail exchange which revealed the extortion attempt which was posted to Pastebin, where a purported Symantec employee known as Sam Thomas was halfway through negotiating payment with an individual called “Yamatough” in order to make sure that the source code for both software titles remained private. To keep up to speed, Yamatough is the Twitter identity of an individual (most probably a group though) that in the past, did threaten to release the source code for Norton Antivirus.

In Thomas’ email, it read, “We will pay you $50,000.00 USD total. However, we need assurances that you are not going to release the code after payment. We will pay you $2,500 a month for the first three months. Payments start 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.” Isn’t this ironic? It all boils down to good faith now, and it goes to show one thing – Symantec thinks that their source code is worth $50k.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: symantec