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Symantec labels vicars' software as spyware

The Church of England's publishing arm has advised clergy to ignore Symantec threat warnings, after its Norton Antivirus product wrongly identified church software as spyware.

Many Church of England vicars use a software tool called Visual Liturgy to plan, create and deliver church services. Four weeks ago, on Saturday, 8 July, Symantec issued a new virus definition which has had "a significant detrimental effect on Visual Liturgy," according to Church House Publishing (CHP), the publishing arm of the Church of England.

Norton's auto-update wrongly identified a file integral to Visual Liturgy as Sniperspy, a piece of spyware. After receiving the update, users were prompted to accept the Sniperspy threat warning and delete the file, called vlutils.dll. This rendered Visual Liturgy useless.

"Up to 4,500 churches with approximately half a million churchgoers have been badly affected by this," said David Green, outgoing new media manager for CHP. "Usually it takes a lot to get a clergyman upset, but we have had a fair few on the phone. There's been no talk of smiting yet, but we'll wait and see," Green added.

And, of course, Symantec's crack Customer Service is on the case:

According to CHP, Symantec has compounded its sin by not responding to repeated requests to put the situation right.

"We spoke to Symantec on Monday morning, and were told to fill in an online false positive form. We were told Symantec would respond within four weeks. From our point of view, this was not good enough," said Green.

Green and CHP staff contacted Symantec in London, Dublin and the US, trying to get them to action the complaint quickly, and asking for escalation at each point. They contacted Dublin in the morning and the US in the afternoon, every day for a week.

"We were told we needed to speak to the Security Response Team, but apparently the Security Response Team doesn't take phone calls," said Green.

Dude. It's a sign.