Norton Security Update Boots AOL Users Offline

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:

AOL appears to be on the ropes, and it certainly doesn’t need any help from Symantec to lose more customers. :-) But in a story reminiscent (though not as bad) as last week, when McAfee started deleting or quarantining Excel, an update to Norton AntiVirus and Norton Internet Security resulted in the disconnection of AOL dial-up and broadband users.

“This update incorrectly detected traffic patterns used as part of the AOL connection as a potential risk,” Symantec said in the statement. AOL has about 20 million Internet service subscribers.

As a result of the incorrect update, AOL dial-up customers lost their connection and AOL broadband users were unable to access AOL servers, Symantec said. The erroneous update was removed from Symantec’s servers about seven hours after it was released, and a corrected version was posted, the company said. Source: News.com

We Say: This ought to be pretty interesting. They’re booted offline, so they can’t get a LiveUpdate to fix the issue. Customers would have to disable their security software in order to get the update; the question is, how many of them will realize the real reason for the problem in order to do that?

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[tags]aol,realtechnews,michael santo,norton,security update[/tags]