The Witty worm also illustrated the potential for security products to become entry points for the attacks they are designed to prevent. At least one large hosting company switched security products after damage from Witty knocked customers servers offline for days.

At the time, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) warned that the Witty worm exposed the “spectacular failure” of the current approach to computer security via patching, saying its innovations could be reproduced to create “a vastly more damaging event.” Given the wide use of Norton firewall products and the ease of repair, the Symantec holes provide an interesting test of the effectiveness of patch-driven security in today’s threat environment.