Symantec pcAnywhere

» see symantec.com/pcanywhere as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

pcanywhere was the kind of thing corporate IT departments used. that was not my world. when i was at hacettepe in the mid-2000s the remote-access tool you saw demonstrated in network classes was vnc, free and unfortunately slow, or the brand new windows xp remote desktop. pcanywhere lived in the layer above. paid software for corporate sysadmins who needed to dial into a coworker's pc over a slow leased line and were willing to pay a license for the privilege.

DMA wrote pcanywhere 1.0 in 1986 for dos and the ibm pc. the original feature was modem-to-modem dial-in. you started pcanywhere on the host, started it on the remote machine, called the host's phone number, watched the host's screen render character by character at 1200 baud. by the early 1990s that was how a lot of consulting work got done. symantec bought DMA in 1991 and rebranded the product norton pcanywhere. the first windows version shipped in march 1993.

for the rest of the 1990s and most of the 2000s, pcanywhere was the boring necessary thing on every windows server. it had host and remote modes, file transfer, a password layer, optional encryption that you usually forgot to enable. corporate IT shops standardized on it because it was an installable msi that the desktop team already knew. by version 12 in 2008 it was selling mostly into enterprise sites that had been buying it since the 1990s.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

the windows xp era was peak pcanywhere. xp's bundled remote desktop existed but was disabled by default and not friendly to consumer users, so the third-party paid remote-access market kept going. pcanywhere had file transfer with drag-and-drop folder copy. it also offered session recording, and the host could be set to require approval before letting a remote user connect. those were features rdp would get years later but did not have in 2003.

the product also showed up in places it should not have. point-of-sale vendors bundled pcanywhere into remote-access kits used to update credit card terminals overnight. that became a 2007 PCI compliance problem when investigators found that pcanywhere installations at restaurant chains were running with default passwords. symantec spent years patching its way out of that story.

~ the day it died ~

on january 24 2012 an indian hacker group called the lords of dharmaraja announced they had stolen symantec source code from an old indian government breach. on february 7 2012 they posted the full pcanywhere source code to the pirate bay. symantec immediately issued an advisory telling customers to disable pcanywhere until patches were available, and released a service pack on april 11 2012. but the brand damage was permanent. in may 2014 symantec announced end-of-life for pcanywhere consumer and small business editions with no replacement product. the enterprise solution variant was wound down quietly over the following year.

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