Symantec has confirmed that source code used in its older enterprise antivirus products was leaked online by hackers this week.

Symantec has confirmed that source code used in its older enterprise antivirus products was leaked online by hackers this week.

"Symantec can confirm that a segment of its source code used in two of our older enterprise products has been accessed, one of which has been discontinued. The code involved is four and five years old," Cris Paden, the company's senior manager for corporate communications, told IDG this morning.

Symantec has no reason to believe at this time that the security and functionality of its products, or any customer information, were compromised, Paden added. Furthermore because these were enterprise products, consumers of Symantec’s Norton AntiVirus are unaffected.

"However, Symantec is working to develop a remediation process to ensure long-term protection for our customers' information. We will communicate that process once the steps have been finalized," he said.

And so ends the source code drama of the week. On Wednesday, a group of hackers calling itself “The Lords of Dharmaraja" claimed on Pastebin (see Google cache) that it had stolen source code and documentation from Symantec and other unnamed software companies, from Indian intelligence agencies which had contracts with these firms. The hacker group claimed it was working out mirrors for publishing the source code, although this remains to be seen.

The Pastebin dump did, however, include documentation for API (application programming interface) procedures for generating virus definitions in Norton AV. The document is dated April 1999, and according to Paden, is obsolete.

"The information in the 1999 document has no bearing or impact on our current products, i.e., the information in the document cannot be used to impair or corrupt our current solutions," Paden said in a statement.

As PCWorld recalls, Symantec isn’t the first victim to source code theft. In 2008, a former Russian employee from Kaspersky Lab stole source code from Kaspersky's AV products and tried to sell it online. He was later suspended for 3.5 years. Kaspersky Lab told NetworkWorld that the theft did not affect its users as the stolen code was for obsolete products.