F-Secure Mac security scanner bug bins benign files

F-Secure has apologised about a bug in its consumer-focused Mac security software that left surfers fighting against their own browsers as clean files were wrongly classified as malign. A faulty definition in the beta version of F-Secure Mac Protection meant that the software had been wrongly identifying some benign files as …

[Anonymous Coward]

What huge volume of Windows malware has to do with it?

I thought we're talking about a problem with the Mac version. The couple of anemic Mac viruses should have not cause any difficulty to F-Secure army of well trained security analysts and developers. Let's look at this: you have two Mac viruses and once in a year there comes a third one. For God's sake, even an autistic monkey would have been able to develop, test and come up with a stable update.

[Shout] Message to F-Secure: Stay with Windows, you're unqualified for writing Mac security apps[/Shout]

[Guy 3]

@Anon #1

Not sure about F-Secure, but most Mac security programs detect Windows malware too... reason being that Mac users often share files with Windows users, and being alturistic folks, don't want to give their friends malicious files.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure about viruses

But I know that mac users are always ready to to fill the ears of Windows users about how great their Mac is and how they should switch immediately and so on...

[foo_bar_baz]

Besserwisser fail

What do you think Mac and Linux virus scanners are used for? Detecting Windows malware.

[Inachu]

EVEN PC VERSION!

Even nortons calls cookies a threat.

[justkyle]

If you're running a *nix based OS

and not running clamav, compiled from MD5 verified source,

then maybe you should just turn in your geek card at the door.

[doperative]

security software for Macs not affected?

> F-Secure has apologised for the problem, which only affected users of its Mac security software. Windows- and Linux-based users of anti-virus packages from F-Secure were unaffected by the problem ..

Cause we don't ever install it, relying instead on making the core OS readonly, and not downloading executable code over the Intertubes ...

> Such false alert problems are all too common to Windows users .. Developers of security software for Macs aren't stuck with this problem ..

I fail to see the logic of those two statements. AV for Windows works just the same on the Mac platform, as in they both search system files and perform a pattern match on a very long list of known signatures. The mathematical odds of false-positives are quite high ..