Symantec said Wednesday it plans to tweak the behavior of its Norton Internet Security and Norton Personal Firewall products so that they are no longer vulnerable to an annoying but otherwise harmless prank that "script kiddie" hackers have been using for the past week or so to knock users off online chat channels.
Last week, a hacker known as HM2K posted a note on his blog about a Norton security feature that could be abused on Internet relay chat (IRC) networks, simple, text-based communities that predate modern instant messaging systems...
Turns out that if someone types "startkeylogger" or "stopkeylogger" in an IRC channel, anyone on the channel using the affected Norton products will be immediately kicked off without warning. These are commands typically issued by the Spybot worm, which spreads over IRC and peer-to-peer file-swapping networks, installing a program that records and transmits everything the victim types (known as a keylogger).
