Doubtless everyone has heard about the Symantec rootkit. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the Sony rootkit. As F-Secure explained:

“Symantec’s rootkit is part of a documented, useful feature; it could be turned on or off and it could easily be uninstalled by the user.”

Symnantec rootkit fuss p2p news / p2pnet

That’s all well and good, but it still created an invisible directory that miscreants could have used to hide malware.

That there’s been a big flap about this without either Symantec doing anything inappropriate with it or a miscreant taking advantage of it (so far as we know); I think it’s a good thing that public reaction has forced recall of the feature before it has done any known harm.

Risk management includes not knowingly including attractive nuisances in software.

-jsq