Indian Hackers Offer Help to American Suing Symantec Corp.

A group of Indian hackers has offered support to an American man who filed a lawsuit against the Symantec Corp. by publishing source code from a 2006 version of Norton Utilities, a software program at the heart of the legal dispute.

A representative of the group, known as Lords of Dharmaraja, released more than 13,000 files that were part of the product's source code late on Friday. Pass it on to forensics and win the lawsuit, YamaTough said via Twitter.

The proposed class-action lawsuit claims that Symantec seeks to convince consumers to buy Norton Utilities and PC Tools software programs by scaring them with misleading information about the health of their computers. Symantec has said those claims are without merit.

It was not immediately clear how the source code might help the case. And one of the attorneys working with plaintiff James Gross said that he did not welcome assistance from the Indian hackers.

This is not something we think is necessary to support our case, and we don't support hacking, said Jay Edelson, an attorney with Edelson McGuire LLC. We are not a rogue nation where the only hope is for people to take matters in their own hands.

Symantec representative Cris Paden said his company no longer sells or supports Norton Utilities 2006. The current version of Norton Utilities has been completely rebuilt and shares no common code with Norton Utilities 2006, he said.

Symantec previously confirmed that the same group of hackers had accessed the source code to some of its antivirus software.

(Reporting by Jim Finke in Boston; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)