Here is a great example of the difficulties encountered by a world-class support organization when things go awry. On Monday, Symantec was hammered by criticism when a buggy update resulted in Norton antivirus end-users seeing messages about a mysterious executable, “pifts.exe” trying to access the internet. As users complained to Symantec, in the unfiltered style of the highly-frustrated, it appeared to be a spam attack and Symantec began deleting posts from their forums. This fed the conspiracy fury.

Then, to make things worse, hackers and opportunistic spammers jumped in to set up bogus websites selling “fixes” for the problem and using keyword targeting on “pifts” to pull in the unsuspecting. Over at Symantec, Dave Cole explained exactly what was going on and eventually, the firestorm was calmed.

Symantec has been a leader in proactive monitoring and support for well over a decade–I had the opportunity to work with them on some of their early surveying efforts. But firestorms like this just go to show that no amount of planning and care can stop the unpredictible. What matters is how you deal with the crisis. Although Symantec ran into early criticism and accusations of “stonewalling” users, they adapted quickly and avoided the kind of mainstream meltdown that makes front page news–like those exploding Dell laptops.