McAfee, a renowned computer security company that offers virus protection and Internet security, has been hacked, as reported by Keith & Annabel Morrigan in their blog post in Kaamar.com entitled “Rumor turns Rogue – McAfee Software Hacked!”

The blog post stated that the Rumor Technology, a part of McAfee’s SaaS Total Protection Service and other services, that delivers updates to computers without a direct internet connection, has been hacked.  The hacked Rumor Technology acts as an Open Proxy on port 6515 which enables hackers use your IP address to bounce messages and spam them on to other sites.  The glitch makes it appear that your address is doing all the spamming. The trouble with this is that those who are unaware that they are infected will be baffled as to why their outgoing e-mails aren’t delivered or blocked by McAfee.

The incident doesn’t indicate any unauthorised access personal files or databases in the affected computers, but businesses using infected computers can suffer from massive increase in unwanted traffic, which can lead to serious short and long term implications.

The authors continued to rant stating that, “As an ultimate insult, even McAfee, whose software is at the root of our problems, now rate our email IP as High Risk: we can’t email them as they have blacklisted us!”

McAfee’s director of security research, David Marcus, confirmed in his blog post that SaaS for Total Protection has been compromised but a patch will be released on January 18 or 19 to address the issue.

Marcus stated on the blog that, “Two issues in SaaS for Total Protection have arisen in the past few days. In the first, an attacker might misuse an ActiveX control to execute code. The second involves a misuse of our “rumor” technology to allow an attacker to use an affected machine as an “open relay,” which could be used to send spam.”