What is Pifts.exe?

Do you run Norton Antivirus?
 
Monday evening, on systems with Norton Internet Protection running, users began to see a popup warning about an executable named PIFTS.exe trying to access the internet. The file was shown to be located in a non-existent folder inside the Symantec LiveUpdate folder.
 
Concerned users turned to the Norton forums with their questions. There were several posts about this to the Norton customer forums asking for help or information on this mysterious program. The initial thread received several thousand views and several pages of replies in a few short hours before being deleted. Several subsequent posts to the Norton forum were deleted much more quickly and users are now getting banned from the forums for any mention of Pifts.
 
This behavior could easily be interpreted as a cover up and has gotten many users more than a little agitated.
 
There's very little info about the behavior of the program other than the fact that it attempts to send info to servers in Africa. A few blogs have started tracking the news (better than I could) such as Bull3t's Blog and Chrysler5thAvenue with updates. News of Pifts.exe has also appeared on The Washington Post, Slashdot and The Inquirer in addition to being submitted to sites like Digg and Reddit. Adding to the mystery, Google Trends' numbers seem to be reset, with Pifts.exe searches skyrocketing and then just dissapearing. Note: Google searches for more info are still largely useless and top results are linking to malware sites (likely an automatic response to increased searches).
 
Nothing to worry about? Unwise move by Norton? Security breach? Hoax? I guess we'll have to watch and see...