Dodgy Avast update classifies multiple legit files as malign

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 …

[Martin Gregorie]

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?

[lpopman]

titular statment

PEBCAK error more than likely....

[Anonymous Coward]

At what point

does the balance tip?

between the risk of true malware verses that of an Entire network of False Positive Borked PC's...

[A J Stiles]

Hah

The real problem here is an operating system without proper "from the ground up" privilege separation (bolting it on post-facto is no good, *especially* if it's bolted on from the outside), coupled with a culture of programmers who think showing their Source Code to one another is a Bad Thing.

[frymaster]

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

[A J Stiles]

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.

[Nebulo]

Human error?

... but the avast! site says "We have highly automated systems and processes for testing and releasing virus updates ... "

This Artificial Intelligence lark is definitely getting a bit out of hand, if its errors are now human.

[Trev 2]

Human error = cheesed off employee?

Sometimes wonder with these kinds of errors if it's more a cheesed off employee who was responsible for adding these errors and of course the system not checking them against all variations of Windows (inc. the ones like XP).

[Anonymous Coward]

I have 1 machine with Avast

guess it's not updating as regularly as it should... kinda glad about that now ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Software from Adobe

hahaha, nowt new there then, seems Avast was doing its job perfectley well!!!!

Sumatra PDF all the way.

[Dave Murray]

Didn't hit me

Realtek sound drivers - check

Adobe software - check

Avast AV - check

Borked PC due to false positives - err no

Didn't hit me on Win7 or Win2k despite all my boxes running the most up to date Avast virus definitions. Perhaps only effects XP or Vista?