UPDATE July 3, 2006... Symantec agreed with our dispute and is removing HyperCam from the list of "Spyware". This should be effective with their next security database update. This is a good news for all of us at Hyperionics and all our customers. Thank you, Symantec, good luck fighting the real spies, pirates and virus writers!
UPDATE, June 30, 2006 - we filed a dispute form with Symantec, waiting for their response. We would like to ask all users of HyperCam reading this to file their "false positive" form at the following link:
which will hopefully prompt them into action. If you could, please write also about the difficulty this situation creates to you by deleting HyperCam software from your system or placing it in quarantine. Thank you!
ALERT, June 27, 2006... Suddenly, after 9 years of presence on the market and legitimate use for creating instructional videos and tutorials, HyperCam product of Hyperionics Technology LLC was classified by Norton Internet Security product as "spyware". They say it could be used to "covertly record your actions on a computer". Whatever hacker would like to use HyperCam in that way, would be a total idiot that does now know what he is doing.
If not anything else, after about 1-2 hours of such recording, the full screen AVI file recorded by HyperCam would probably take all of free disk space and stopped working. The recording would not operate over Internet to send video frames to other computers because of bandwidth limitation - only a fastest hard disk can record full screen video. And rather sophisticated extra program would have to be written and installed to control HyperCam in that way (start or stop recording at specific times, disable blinking frame and HyperCam icon in the task bar that indicates HyperCam running and recording etc.) You can find Symantec report on us here:
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/spyware.hypercam.html
We are trying to contact Symantec and explain things. No idea if they will respond, but we will post more information here, as it becomes available.
If you are concerned about any warning of HyperCam trying to connect to the Internet, you can find more information on this at our FAQ page here:
This is a periodic check for availability of new versions of HyperCam, which are free upgrades to registered users. It happens by default every 7 days, does only a download of information from Hyperionics web site (does not send anything to us), and can be easily turned off from the "License" tab of HyperCam with a click on "Check for a new version..." button and entering 0 into the frequency field there.