Dodgy Avast update classifies multiple legit files as malign
Initiates needless Chicken Little-style panic
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Popular free of charge anti-virus scanner Avast went berserk late last week and began classifying legitimate files as infected.
Legitimate products were wrongly classified as harbouring the Dell-MZG Trojan or other strains of malware and whisked off to quarantine following the publication of a dodgy update. Avast has published a new update that eliminates the wrongful classification glitch. However, that still leaves users who applied the earlier update with borked systems.
False positives are a well known shortcoming of anti-malware scanners. Avast's snafu last Thursday was only unusual because it classified a large number of legitimate programmes as malign. Software from Adobe, Realtek sound card drivers and various media players were all affected.
Avast has published an apology for the cock-up and advice on restoring systems in a blog post (here) and its forum (here).
The anti-virus firm blamed "human error" for the mix-up. ®
COMMENTS
stop talking mince
whatever kind of privilege separation exists, your virus scanner will be running at "most privileged" and "allowed to do anything it wants" levels or it's pointless
furthermore, virus definition files are neither source nor compiled, they're data files
Wot no testing?
'The anti-virus firm blamed "human error" for the mix-up.'
So thats human error as in "We don't need to test it" then?
No, go deeper
I think you are misunderstanding something.
If people used operating systems with proper privilege separation, one process couldn't just go stomping over another process's files willy-nilly.
And if programmers didn't act as though their Source Code was allergic to daylight or something, but shared it around with other programmers, then there would be fewer schoolboy errors doing the rounds.
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