I hope I’m not hiding my total disgust for any company that hides crap on our computers. What Sony BMG did with the whole rootkit stuff was the kind of activity you expect from something that slithers through the grass. Now, Symantec joins their reptillian cousin having to acknowledge the existence of a rootkit-type feature in Norton SystemWorks.

The anti-virus vendor acknowledged that it was deliberately hiding a directory from Windows APIs as a feature to stop customers from accidentally deleting files but, prompted by warnings from security experts, the company shipped a SystemWorks update to eliminate the risk.

If we can’t trust the anti-spyware, anti-virus vendors who are charging us for definition updates and their software than who do we trust? Sheesh, this news is only good for security professionals who help discover this type of garbage and alert the rest of us to who’s spiking the punch.