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F-Secure casts some stones
Blogs can be a powerful tool to spread information, but this week we were saddened when F-Secure chose to use its blog to wrongly accuse vnunet.com of spreading misinformation (full disclosure: this blog is part of vnunet.com and its author is a vnunet.com employee).
Vnunet.com reporter Matt Chapman at the Infosec security expo in London spoke with F-Secure's UK country manager, who told him about a new Symbian worm that allegedly sends text messages to premium numbers. Smelling an interesting news story, Iain assumed that a country manager for F-Secure qualified as a trustworthy news source, and proceeded to write his story.
F-secure on Thursday responded on its blog, claming that Iain had his facts mixed up. But while the blog post was written at F-Secure's corporate headquarters in Finland, they failed to check with either F-Secure UK or with vnunet.com. While accusing vnunet.com of poor reporting, they failed to check their facts and rushed to conclusions.
An audio recording soon popped up that set the record straight (audio linked below). While it took some time and several friendly emails, F-Secure has now updated its blog and removed all accusations against vnunet.com.
The question remains how many of the people who saw the original blog posting will also read the updated version. Blogging isn't just nice PR tool, but comes with a certain responsibility too.
But no hard feelings.
Misinformation can lead to embarrassing situations
Photo: steven todey
Tags: f-secure, security, blogosphere
April 29, 2006 at 01:12 AM | Permalink
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