| This application (PIFTS.EXE) seems to gather product usage statistics and product activation verification for the various Norton applications. Since I seriously doubt any government (foreign or domestic) would be interested in how often customers use Norton Ghost, for example, to backup their computers, I really think conspiracy theorists have went way out on a limb on this one.
The only IP's I've seen this application access are those owned by Symantec, Swapdrive (probably related to Swapdrive features contained in several Symantec applications), and Microsoft (apparently checks for critical Symantec updates on the Microsoft Automatic Updates website and triggers LiveUpdate). I've seen no effort by this application to contact any IP in Africa. Finally, I'm not aware of any method to determine if the application is accessing internet history.
As far as I can tell, this application is not at all unusual, with most computers (any operating system) containing similar applications with similar functions.
stewart |