This is ridiculous "the sky is falling" journalism at its worst; don't get caught up in it Freepers. It's a nice "bash-a-successful-company" tone that belongs on socialist/commie Slashdot but not here.
(1) There is no known public exploit of this vulnerability. And Symantec has released a heuristic (signature) that detects it, so if you are using Symantec software in the first place, you are probably getting the most up-to-date update so now you are OK.
(2) if you are a consumer, you would get infected only if you interact and download a malicous RAR file, which is a not-very-popular file compression algorithm. And for it to "take over your computer", the malicious file would have to be written to successfully execute code on you PC/laptop, which is no easy feat.
(3) if your company's or ISP's Gateways are using Symantec's email security products, the admins could/would have put a block on RAR files until Symantec came out with the heuristic, which was a span of less than 36 hours.
(4) Symantec Antivirus Corporate Editions 8 & 9 are not affected; that makes up about 90% of the corporate pie.
Move along folks; nothing to see here.
And shame on you Freepers who got duped :-)
Any other questions, please email me at iggy_e@yahoo.com. As you can guess, I know something about this.
Thanks for your comments.
What is your opinion on dropping Norton in favor of AVG, Nod32, McAfee, BitDefender, or Sophos , etc.