Sorry everybody for being silent that much. You won’t believe it but Symantec offered us money to keep quiet. @YamaTough

After weeks of silence, that’s the tweet that came from YamaTough, member of the hacktivist collective Anonymous.  According to YamaTough, he was bribed $50,000 by Symantec to keep quiet about the hack that happened in 2006, to destroy the hacked source codes of Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition; Norton Internet Security; Norton SystemWorks (Norton Utilities and Norton GoBack); and pcAnywhere acquired during the said hack, and to retract his earlier announcement about releasing the source codes.

YamaTough is said to have been in communication with a certain Sam Thomas, believed to be a Symantec employee, since January, but kept mum about their communication. YamaTough posted the exchange of e-mail between him and Thomas on Pastebin, though I believe it is not complete since you can’t tell who initiated the communication and how the $50,000 came up in the conversation, if it was offered by Thomas or if YamaTough asked for it in exchange for his silence.

To summarize, the negotiations fell apart when the Symantec employee kept delaying the $50k payment and YamaTough got impatient.  The hacker claims that he was just tricking Symantec to see what they were going to do about the hacking, the source codes and the secret communication between him and the Symantec employee.

“In January, an individual claiming to be part of the ‘Anonymous’ group attempted to extort a payment from Symantec in exchange for not publicly posting stolen Symantec source code they claimed to have in their possession,” a company representative said in an email on Monday night.

“Symantec conducted an internal investigation into this incident and also contacted law enforcement given the attempted extortion and apparent theft of intellectual property. The communications with the person(s) attempting to extort the payment from Symantec were part of the law enforcement investigation. Given that the investigation is still ongoing, we are not going to disclose the law enforcement agencies involved and have no additional information to provide.”

According to PCMag, no Sam Thomas was found in LinkedIn connected or employed at Symantec.  They also tried contacting Thomas via the e-mail address found on the Pastebin post but received no reply.

About 16 hours ago, YamaTough tweeted:

All the Symantec source codes are now on sale! PcAnywhere, System Works, Internet Security and Norton GoBack with Utilities, NAV

The source code is now available on The Pirate Bay for download.

Attacked by “cowards”

Puckett and Faraj, PC, the law firm that represented Marine Frank Wuterich known for leading his men in the Haditha Killings in 2005 that resulted in the death of 24 civilians, is pissed at Anonymous for shutting down their e-mail and web site.  They turn to Twitter to blow off some steam:

PuckettFaraj cyber-attacked Friday by cowards for defending Frank Wuterich from the government the hackers seek to destroy – go figure. – @puckettfaraj

Wuterich plead guilty to charges filed against him, but Anonymous was outraged that Wuterich’s charges were just reduced and he was merely demoted to being a Private, the lowest rank in the service, while  U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning could possibly face a life sentence for allegedly participating in the largest leak of classified information in American history to online whistleblowing site WikiLeaks.

“We want to bring attention to USMC SSgt Frank Wuterich who along with his squad murdered dozens of unarmed civilians during the Iraqi occupation,” the manifesto said. “Can you believe this scumbag had his charges reduced to involuntary manslaughter and only got away with a pay cut?”

Puckett and Faraj’s website is still down.