Cyber Gang 'Lords of Dharmaraja' Claim to Have Stolen Source Code for Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus Software

A cyber gang of criminal computer hackers, calling themselves 'The Lords of Dharmaraja,' are claiming to have illegally gotten a hold of Symantec source code.

According to news reports, this group of hackers - seeming to originate from India - are claiming to have successfully stolen Symantec's Norton AntiVirus software's source code and are planning to reveal it over the net by posting it on the web. Reportedly, 'The Lords of Dharmaraja' were able to lift this particular bit of the security giant, Symantec's source code by hacking web servers that belong to a branch of India's military intelligence.

Promises of a Sneak Peak to the Stolen Data Made in Early January

According to evidence posted in the first few days of the new year, this group of hackers promised to release the entirety of the stolen source code in time, but first - according to a Pastebin document - were planning to release a sneak peak of the stolen data.

Upon the release of this supposed 'sneak peak,' however, it was revealed by a Symantec spokesperson that the data released, by the group of hackers, as a supposed sneak peak to the stolen source code did not, in fact, contain any proprietary programming data owned by Symantec. According to Symantec's Chris Paden, "It wasn't source code. It was a document from April 28, 1999 defining the application programming interface for [Symantec's virus] definition generation service." Paden continued on to conclude his statement about the lack of Symantec source code contained within the sneak peak by surmising that the released document "explains how the software is designed to work and contains function names, but there is no actual source code present."

Reportedly, Symantec is in the process of determining what, exactly, could be the possible consequences of this security breach, and the security giant is working to determine what impact the exposure of the released document (the supposed sneak peak) may in the coming months.

According to the Lords of Dharmaraja, they were able to illegally procure source code that belongs to numerous major computer security companies, and claimed that they were "working out mirrors as of now since we experience extreme pressure and censorship from U.S. and India government agencies."

Following these statements, Symantec's spokesperson, Paden, claimed that the company was investigation the hacker-group's claims: "We can't speculate on what they have and don’t have, and we can't speculate on how they got the information," but added that he doubted the group success in actually breach Symantec's security defenses to procure the supposedly stolen data.

New Updates from Symantec

More recent reports on this matter have since been released by Symantec, and the company has since confirmed that the Lords of Dharmaraja were able to compromise a sector of its source code.

Symantec has reported that the group of hackers was, in fact, able to illegally obtain source code belonging to two different, fairly outdated security products, Endpoint 11.0 and Antivirus 10.2 - both of which are over four years old.

The security giant additionally reported that it popular line of anti-virus products, Norton Security products, were unaffected by the security breach; Symantec released a statement via Facebook post that stated "Presently, we have no indication that the code disclosure impacts the functionality or security of Symantec's solution," and concluded with the quick reassurance that, "Furthermore, there are no indications that customer information has been impacted or exposed at this time."

It was also confirmed that the breach that resulted in the leaked data was not a breach of Symantec's security, itself, but rather the stolen data was the result of the hackers' successful breach of a third-party's defenses.