While the vandals claimed to have infected Symantec's network two months ago with a worm, quaintly dubbed Bloworm, the company denied Monday that any worm existed on its systems.
"There is no virus infection, no worm infection, and no danger to customers," said Richard Saunders, a spokesman for the Cupertino, Calif., company.
"They didn't get in beyond posting a mildly offensive, but otherwise impotent, message on our home page."
The five cyber vandals, who identified themselves only by their handles, claimed otherwise. "0ur w0rm iz spreading around (Symantec's) netw0rk and infecting (it's) f1lez, since about 2 months ago. phear," stated the group in a document of typically spelling-impaired hacker-speak. The document was left behind by the group after it broke into the servers of Symantec at about 5 a.m. PT Monday.
Worms are virus-like programs that infect systems through networks automatically and without the need for an unknowing user to open a file or run an application.
Symantec (Nasdaq:SYMC) has always been a popular target for Internet vandals looking for a hard nut to crack. The only difference: This time someone actually got in.
"What this incident does show is that you cannot be complacent towards this kind of threat," said Saunders. The Symantec spokesman could not detail how the cyber vandals entered the company's network.
Symantec engineers took down the page within an hour of its posting, but not before the media in Europe got wind of the defacement. The BBC posted a story early Monday morning.
