AVAST BLOWS UP!

[laura_seabrook]

I use the free version of AVAST + ZONE ALARM to protect my PCs. However (as listed at DSLReports.com) ...

Avast Antivirus Has Gone Mad
Antivirus program suddenly sees false positives everywhere...
11:11PM Wednesday Dec 02 2009 by Karl Bode
While it veers off astray from our normal subject matter of broadband-related news, users in our security forum are indicating that Avast antivirus appears to have gone seriously off of the rails. According to users, the application has suddenly decided to flag many safe applications, freshly-downloaded files and dlls as malicious, wreaking havoc on user systems. It appears that the program is flagging a number of files used by entirely normal programs such as Skype, Spybot Search and Destory and other programs incorrectly as the Win32:Delf-MZG trojan.

Avast's official forums are currently being crushed by the sudden onslaught of traffic created by confused users, many of whom are being told that generic program files are a security threat. As of now, impacted users should uninstall the application until Avast can issue a bug fix, lest they delete necessary files on the advice of an anti-virus program gone mad. Avast, which just celebrated the addition of its 100,000,000th user, is in for a very busy night.

Update: The first official statement from Avast can be found here.

Buggered if I know what to do, other than use another program.

Comments

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

AVG forever!

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

I used to use AVG, but it became incompatible with my graphics card (I have no idea if it still is).

[radargrrl.livejournal.com]

Try it again.

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

You mean AVG?

[radargrrl.livejournal.com]

Zigackly!

[jessie-c.livejournal.com]

Zone Alarm has always been brain dead so this does not surprise me in the least.

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

But in this case it's Avast that's crewing up.

[jessie-c.livejournal.com]

For some reason I had both pegged to the same provider in my brain. Clearly I have a virus related to data storage that wipes out my brain's indexing system and makes everything run together.

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

Computers would be that much simpler if they did.

[kath-ballantyne.livejournal.com]

I gave up Avast because of issues of my computer freezing and running slow. It was also flagging things that I knew were clean.

I use AVG right now. It just updated again.