Symantec employee spams friends

DISCLAIMER: I'd just like to start off by saying I'm not going to name names as I don't want to get my friend into trouble with his employer, but I think what I'm about to discuss is not without a sense of irony.

DISCLAIMER #2: If anyone has any legitamate reasons for this post to be removed then please do leave a comment and let me look into it.

Most people in the world know the names 'Symantec' and 'Norton' and know that each area is associated with anti virus software and computer protection; spam filtering and general computer wellness. No one is excluded from being attacked from attack injection and trojan infiltration, even Symantec employees.

Over the past couple of months I've had some spam which hadn't been filtered out by gmail spam filter. After looking at the email I realised it was from one of my friend's email addresses and not picked up. I assumed that it had been used from some sort of phishing attack or he'd not read the small print of a website he had signed up to and they had sold it to a 3rd party and they were spamming me; but no ...

After looking at the other email addresses it had been sent to, yes lots of people in the to: section of the email, it became clear that it had come from his email client or msn client. I recognised some of the addresses of people we know in common and that they could have only come from this address list ...

... had someone hacked his email address?
... had an ex-girlfriend gone up against him? (that was a stupid idea, he's not that much of a ladies man ;-))

... nope, he'd must have downloaded something dodgy and been infected! Someone who works for such a high profile company which supplies a large number of small, medium and enterprise companies with corporate anti spam and anti-virus software and being effected was shocking!!

So just to say to everyone, be careful where you sign up for; be careful which plugins for MSN messager you use; be careful of the small print when signing up for legit reasons, you never know who will be spamming friends in the near future.