Symantec chief: no customers harmed in fake cert scandal

No Symantec customers were harmed during the vendor's recent digital certificate scandal, chief executive Michael Brown claimed during a visit to Sydney yesterday.

In September, Symantec sacked multiple employees for leaking fake, testing digital certificates for Google onto the internet. Symantec and its subsidiary Thawte said at the time that only "a small number" of certificates were leaked.

Later audits found a total of 187 test certificates for more than 80 companies and domains were leaked onto the public web.

"No customers were at risk. These certificates never were loose on the wild in the internet, but in our own environment some process was not followed," said Brown at Symantec's Australian headquarters in Sydney.

He added that processes have been "cleaned up" and that the situation is now "under control".

Since the audits, Google has demanded Symantec hold further enquiries into why it did not discover the fake certificates in the first place.

Security-only channel

Brown told Australian journalists that channel partners have expressed renewed enthusiasm for Symantec now that it is once again a security-only company.

"People can see we're on the move again," said the Silicon Valley-based chief executive. "We've always been a channel-based company – there's a lot in that for our channel partners in terms of the money they can make with us."

"This is also the first time we've been able to focus on security-only channel partners. Before as a company we had to straddle between folks who were also selling storage management software."

Symantec last month launched its Advanced Threat Protection offering that pits it against more youthful rivals such as FireEye and Palo Alto Networks, with Australia's Data#3 as one of the beta partners.

Brown said yesterday that 12 more new enterprise security products would be announced in the "next three quarters".

Symantec's post-split product expansion and re-invigorated channel contrasts with Intel Security's fortunes. Intel announced last month that it would be selling off McAfee Next-Generation Firewall and McAfee Firewall Enterprise businesses to Raytheon Websense, giving its competitors an opportunity to poach its channel partners.

Earlier this month, Brown was forced to fend off some tough questions at the company's annnual general meeting, with some shareholders expressing frustration at the lack of growth despite data security's growing prominence in the enterprise world.