More card scams
Leading on from my last post, there’s more credit card tomfoolery and it’s not from the wall this time. We’ve all been there, you have a problem with a bank account/software product/bill/other and you call up the standard customer services number. The likelihood of this number going to an Indian call centre is fairly high, outsourcing is common practice as part of corporate cost cutting so a localised helpdesk is becoming rarer.
In this case, said Indian call centre working for Symantec was used to obtain and sell credit card details of customers who called them. It seems to be a slick operation, let’s say you want to purchase Norton Internet Security (god knows why) and you do it over the phone. These details are held in a database, and all it would take is an insider to siphon these details off and pass onto third parties to sell.
The article does raise a question on data protection, these call centres are overseas so do they have stringent guidelines to follow laws specified in other countries. Symantec may have declared this to be a rare case, but there shouldn’t be any cases, period. If there is an “isolated” incident, that could be the ones they are aware of. What about the ones that are completely unknown to them? Do they send auditors to India to check that best practices are adhered to? Not only does Symantec AV products use 99% of your system resources, it’s creator also unscrupulously breaks the Data Protection act with disregard for the customer. Let’s hope this doesn’t get brushed under the carpet.
Since we are on the topic of Symantec and my dislike for their anti-virus product, this is a rather amusing post about PIFTS.EXE which was rumoured to be a “call home” executable that is included with some of Symantec’s products. You have to chuckle at the subject headers of example troll posts. We will never know whether it does collect personal data and sends it back, but one thing they did admit to was that their uninstall process isn’t very clean.
“We received reports of PIFTS.EXE updates on systems where no Norton Internet Security or Norton AntiVirus 2006 or 2007 products were installed. We investigated the situation and now understand how this happened.”
Well no news there, I have worked with Symantec Enterprise and Norton Home products before and to say it leaves crap behind is an understatement. In situations like this, the best thing to use are removal tools, so you can completely eradicate your system of all Symantec/Norton components.
- CleanWipe (used to be called NoNAV) – For Symantec Anti-virus client/Symantec Enterprise products. You have to go through Symantec’s support site to get a copy of this.
- Norton Removal Tool – For Norton home products.
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