Norton labels Nasa app as adware

Cupertino, we have a problem

By John Leyden, 17th July 2007

Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery

Symantec has updated its anti-virus definition files after a duff update falsely identified two open source packages as adware.

Norton Anti-Virus updates issued on Sunday falsely detected both Filezilla, open source FTP client, and NASA World Wind, an open source virtual globe developed by NASA and others, as the parasitic program Adware-Cpush. An update issued on Monday fixed the problem.

False positives are well known as something of an Achilles heel for signature-based malware detection. Problems crop up regularly.

As the SANS Intitute's Internet Storm Centre notes, the pressure on anti-virus vendors to release signature updates quickly is growing. Inevitably, this means testing, particularly against more unusual software packages, becomes (at best) perfunctory.

If VXers exploited this behaviour it might be possible to create strains of malware that matched the signature of "safe" files. "Manipulating malware to maximise false-positives could be an entertaining (and certainly painful) way to wreak havoc. Some basic research exists on this theory already, though nothing ready for market," SANS researcher John Bambenek writes. ®

Agentless Backup is Not a Myth

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Posted Wednesday 18th July 2007 11:08 GMT

Morten Ranulf Clausen

Ahem...

"As I said to my friend, be safe when surfing porn (yes that's why he got the Trojan, have since given him safe sites to surf)."

Aren't Trojans supposed to keep you safe when dealing with that area of life, or am I sadly mistaken...?

*getting hat/coat/etc...*

Posted Tuesday 17th July 2007 19:31 GMT

Anonymous Coward

Not just WoW, Ragnarök also

AVG Free 7.5 also flags Ragnarök (another MMORPG just like WoW) anti-cheat tools (nProtect Gameguard) as if infected with a trojan (something like Proxy.PKM), and claims it removed it. But every time the game is run again, the anti-cheat tools reinstall by itself. Norton Antivirus 2006 won't even let the game run.

So, on another newly formatted machine, I installed the game, installed AVG, and it becomes clear that the trojan IS PART of the game anti-cheat system, since it showed up again.

I also had a zipped (compressed...) copy of the game folder, long forgotten (and therefore safely contained) that AVG also picked up, proving that along with every copy of the game, there it was also the trojan.

It seems that the only way Koreans will ensure that nobody is hacking their game is to install a rootkit themselves in your machine, so if they think you are cheating, they can log in the rootkit and take a look at the memory registers used in the character stats/items/cash (usually what people will try to hack).

Or... er... you can't tell if they are truly running this rootkit tool or if they are unaware that their servers are stuffed.

Anyway, after I log in the game, I run AVG, remove the trojan, and play safely until the game is closed again. They should either confirm they run the rootkit, so I can tell AVG to ignore it, or tell AVG that their software is legitimate and it is a false positive. Meanwhile I will keep deactivating it, even if it is part of the game. It appears not, as it runs anyway.

Surely I will ask their tech support about it...

Posted Tuesday 17th July 2007 15:37 GMT

Richard