Yahoo! Messenger! Trojan! false alarm!

Check Point's personal firewall software falsely identified a component of Yahoo! Messenger as a Trojan this week. ZoneAlarm Pro mistakenly pegged an audio conferencing ActiveX control within Yahoo Messenger as the Yspy Trojan. As a result users of the software were prompted to delete yacscom.dll, a critical component of the …

[Rob]

Is it just me?

Or does anybody else think that "Microsoft's Live OneCare" sounds a little bit too close to "Microsoft's Live Wanker"?

[Steven]

Kaspersky

"Kaspersky's designation of software as infected by a low-risk virus"

Good old Kaspersky, everytime I update my audio driver it seems to think I have a trojan.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just you...

Try saying it in a french accent...

[Eddie Johnson]

@Rob

I don't know about that but it certainly falls in the category of crypticware. How 'bout giving us a product name that reflects what the product actually does?

Oh... wait... its an AV product so its supposed to provide an ineffective but comforting, false feeling of security, maybe the name *does* reflect what it fails to do.

[Andy Barber]

@Rob

Top Man!

[Ron Eve]

@Is it just me?

Nah.. It's been discussed before.

Years ago Wang Computers had a support service called 'Wang Care'. I kid you not....

[Matthew Sinclair]

Pfft

False alarm or not... your out of your bloody mind if you use yahell's msg'r.

Be a real geek and use Pidgen or Trillian.

No Ads no crud no trash no fuss.

: O P

[Daniel B.]

Oh so that's why

I found it funny too, that when I came home Wednesday night I found that ZoneAlarm had detected yacscom.dll as a "Trojan". Good thing I just Quarantined it.

Less funny, though, that last weekend ZoneAlarm decided that the distributed.net client was a Trojan/Botnet and deleted it without prompting me! So it isn't the only false positive...

[Anonymous Coward]

@ Ron Eve

And while you're there, don't forget those fine upstanding suppliers of test kit, Wayne Kerr

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft One Care

I suppose I rather have to post this as anon, I worked for MS, yes there was much much hilarity in the UK when this product name came out of Redmond. No-one could believe they'd go through with it, but they did...everyone spent a day sounding like they were from 'Allo 'Allo.

But I'm not that surprised - there's an internal bug tracking tool extension, named (entirely without irony) "Bugger". You can imagine the dev conf calls with the US who couldn't quite get why the UK phones would mute every few minutes when someone says "Could you Bugger that for me?" "It's been Buggered for a while now", etc., as we'd giggle like schoolboys every single time.

Halo Gates as it brought much light relief to long conf call days...

[Kanhef]

hmm

"Microsoft's Live OneCare anti-virus service falsely warning that Gmail's website was contaminated by a computer virus."

I wonder if that was /really/ an accident...

[Michael Neumann]

Yahoo! story! title!

This! dig! at! Yahoo! is! getting! really! old! Find! something! new!

As for the warning, ok, I use Pigdin, but Zone-Alarm does give too many false alarms.

[Dr Patrick J R Harkin]

@Ron Eve

"Years ago Wang Computers had a support service called 'Wang Care'. I kid you not...."

And I am told that Siemens corporate standard for its offices was to answer the phone with "Siemens, <location>" as in "Siemens, Seattle" or "Siemens, Berlin" until they opened an office in Staines... Dead granny? Dunno, but a good story anyway and this is the internet after all, so veracity doesn't really matter.