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ESET blocks news sites

Antivirus updates from security firm ESET blocked access to El Reg today.

Other news websites such as the BBC were also affected by Thursday's update.

The snafu caused a certain amount of consternation (here and here) before it was resolved with a rollback to previous virus definition files. ESET told The Reg: "Today, ESET for a brief period of a few minutes was incorrectly blocking certain websites in the United Kingdom. The false positive affected only a fraction of users and the issue was fixed automatically. We apologize for any inconvenience to the affected users."

False positives are a well known Achilles’ Heel of anti-malware packages and all vendors suffer them from time to time.

A borked ESET antivirus update categorised much, if not all, of the web as too risky to browse back in late February. Sites including Amazon, MSN and even ESET’s own site were falsely labelled as harbouring malicious JavaScript code.

A statement from ESET sent to El Reg said: "Today, ESET for a brief period of a few minutes was incorrectly blocking certain websites in the United Kingdom. The false positive affected only a fraction of users and the issue was fixed automatically. We apologize for any inconvenience to the affected users” ®

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