14 DAY TRIAL // Security giant Symantec issued a warning last Friday saying that the threat condition on the Internet has escalated to level 4, which is the most severe. I guess a lot of people got scared. It's not everyday security experts say the Internet is crashing down on us. In any case, it was all bogus - they were just running a test when they sent out this message, but about one hour later, they informed the users that it was not true.
If you're using Symantec products and didn't get this warning, don't worry - only people with the DeepSight advanced alert system got it. As Seen on ComputerWorld, the message's subject simply read "DeepSight Increased ThreatCon from 1 to 4 Alert".
I don't know if you usually browse security related sites, but most of them have a little bar that shows security threat levels on the web. The bar basically has 4 colors - green, yellow, orange and red - green means normal threat level while red means great security risk. You usually see a little arrow indicating the green or the yellow color. That would be the normal state of things, and to be honest, I've never seen that little arrow go all the way to red. And also, as ComputerWorld has it, Symantec has never increased the threat condition to level 4, ever, and did not have a level 3 one since the dangerous Sasser worm popped up way back in May 2004.
Some people might say they've read news about 4-5 sites getting hacked in one day - isn't that code red or something? It isn't, and here's why: lots and lots of sites get hacked daily, many people get viruses and spam is sent by the billions, this is just the basic state of the Web. Sure, it's not very good, but it can get a lot worse! A lot of bad things happen on the Net, but they don't always get into the news - just like real life, the nasty stuff you hear about on TV is not even 10% of what actually happens!