pifts.exe

4chan prank afterall then?

Masamune wrote:http://www.tech-linkblog.com/2009/03/conspiracy-theories-run-rampant-due-to-piftsexe.html/

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/PIFTS.exe

lol wtf

Masamune, when I visited that second link a pop-up appeared on my lower screen asking if I wanted Pifts to access have internet access. I don't feel like reading through pages of mind crap to figure out what's going on with my computer.

Someone explain if the link that Masamune has referenced has somehow put Pifts.exe on my computer.

That's just a GIF, not a real pop-up.

Now I feel retarded. But, with the depth of .php and other languages I'm learning not to trust even "simple-looking" pop-ups anymore. Especially anything connected to anonymous.

It doesn't look like a prank, though I might be wrong. What I've gathered from the combined articles, is that this executable included with Norton, sends your browsing history, temp files, porn, whatever, and sends it to Symantec, Microsoft, and some mysterious data analysis place is Arlington, VA. I could just be being gullible, but it looks like people were spooked about this even before 4chan got ahold of it.

It gives computers AIDS... I think that right there is cause to believe it isn't real.

franpa wrote:It gives computers AIDS... I think that right there is cause to believe it isn't real.

That doesn't count. ED says everything has aids. Any article on there is based around some truth, and is then mocked and tormented out of proportion. That article basically serves as a summary of what it is and some silly history concerning it.

Man you people are lazy. Here's the rundown based on the article you didn't read.

It's a component of some Symantec crap that exists in a folder that is hidden from Windows (rootkits do this). Symantec forgot to give it a backdoor through their security suite, so it started asking for internet access. Users were like "PIFTS.exe? I don't know any PIFTS.exe, what is it?" So, they looked for it. And noticed the folder it was in was rootkitted away. Suspicious. So they asked about it on the Symantec forums, and the thread was deleted. Others asked, and they were deleted too.

Whether or not the program is innocent, there's lessons learned here:

• It's two thousand and mother-loving nine. The 8.3 naming convention has been dead for at least two decades now. If Symantec had named the tool "Symantec Performance Profiling Tool.exe" there would have been less alarm. In fact, if virus writers would quit naming their stuff "xyzzy.exe" and start naming it "Windows Live Messenger.exe" they'd get better penetration. I don't get why we still pretend that every letter in a file name is precious.
• It's bad for your program to use rootkit-like behavior to hide stuff. It always gets found out, and it's never been found without causing controversy. It doesn't matter what the application does, you hid it and denied that it existed; you don't do that with good things.
• When users ask a question about your super-secret tool that's oh-so-important, the best answer is not trying to suppress their requests. You only control one forum on the internet; there's thousands of others. Google caches yours and all others. When you try to suppress information on the internet, it multiplies and the act of suppression makes the news. Bad PR all-around.
• It's two thousand and mother-loving nine! Quit paying stupid amounts of money for antivirus suites that consistently have problems making the top 10 lists in both performance and accuracy. Go get Avira or Avast; they're free, faster, and work better.

AtmaWeapon wrote:Symantec is an awful company that makes awful products and charges high prices because they have a trusted name (kind of like Creative).

We all already knew that, we don't need to read some borring old article.