“Security firm Symantec withheld information about at least one big cyberthreat for hours after spotting it, possibly harming millions of Internet users.

Symantec claims to have identified the Slammer worm that ravaged the Internet during the last weekend of January hours before anyone else did. Symantec then shared the information only with select customers, leaving the rest of the global community to get slapped around by Slammer.

In a Feb. 12 press release about its DeepSight Threat Management System, Symantec boasts that the company “discovered the Slammer worm hours before it began rapidly propagating.” Wired News [via Walker]