This is a follow up from yesterday’s blog post. Yesterday afternoon, Symantec’s Norton Protection Blog broke silence and addressed the concerns of Norton Antivirus customers regarding the recent PIFTS.exe incident. According to the blog post, the PIFTS.exe application was part of a diagnostic patch for customers using Norton Antivirus 2006 and 2007. The blog post explains that the patch went out unsigned due to a human error, which caused customer firewall applications to send alerts to users.

According to the post, there’s no danger to any Norton Antivirus customer. As for the disappearing posts on Norton’s community forum, the blog explains that some forum members were creating new accounts and posting multiple threads on the forum about PIFTS.exe. While some of these threads were certainly on the childish side, others appeared to be sincere requests for information. It appears that Norton forum administrators nuked any and all messages that included “PIFTS.exe.”