avast what a blunder!

[happychappy]

let me begin here:

http://support.avast.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=377

On Thursday 3.12. 2009 avast! had a bad false positive issue. At around 00:15 AM GMT we released VPS update 091203-0 which started flagging hundreds of innocent files as a 'Win32elf-MZG' Trojan (or, in less common cases, as 'Win32:Zbot-MKK'). Among the files affected were high-profile programs produced by Adobe, Realtek, sound card drivers, various media players etc.

A laptop that installed this update went beserk saying we were infested with trojans , we deleted everything it said was a trojan and now it seems several critical system files (it no longer want to start up) were deleted in this process.

Only safe mode is working now, so in effect avast antivirus became the worst virus ever!! well done avast!

So now we are stuck, the lappie isn't critical but is important... E-mailed their support hope they are willing to work this out with me, sigh gonna take forever! don't they test their updates?

 

[nihilist]

Ouch!

Didn't AVG have a few issues like this a while back?

 

[LazyLion]

haha! I gave up on Avast when it deleted all my game cracks and Trainers without even asking me. Failware of epic note.

 

[nihilist]

haha! I gave up on Avast when it deleted all my game cracks and Trainers without even asking me. Failware of epic note.

Yeah - a lot of AV's do this I've found, the leeetle conspiracy guy in me says it's deliberate ...

 

[LazyLion]

Yeah - a lot of AV's do this I've found, the leeetle conspiracy guy in me says it's deliberate ...

Ja, but Kaspersky has an option to turn off that feature and at least the others prompt you first and give you the option of excluding it.

 

[nihilist]

Been using NOD32 for quite a while now and really like it, doesn't lag the PC at all, minimal UI and gets the job done + minimal nags.

 

[Asha'man X]

I'm considering switching from Avast myself now, I just feel it has become slower and almost bloated. While I do appreciate that it is free and has a number of great modules built in, the performance hit is starting to annoy me. I'm even considering Microsoft Security Essentials or paying for a year of NOD32.

Hmmm

 

[LazyLion]

Yes, MSE is very nice, extremely low overhead and getting high ratings.

 

[cryptic1]

I've been using Bitdefenfer (2010) on trial for a few weeks now & all's fine thus far. I'm considering purchasing.

 

[NoRulez]

Avast! still rulez the free AVs

Wahahahah... noobs!
If you know where your lappie has been, the very first thing to do whenever ANY antivirus package prompts for action on a 'so called' virus is to investigate before starting to delete left right and centre!
Within minutes of Avast! going crazy, the security forums was full of it - all false positives!
Within an hour of the release of the faulty pattern file, an updated corrected version was released.
Good going, quick acting from the Avast! dev team.

 

[LazyLion]

Wahahahah... noobs!
If you know where your lappie has been, the very first thing to do whenever ANY antivirus package prompts for action on a 'so called' virus is to investigate before starting to delete left right and centre!
Within minutes of Avast! going crazy, the security forums was full of it - all false positives!
Within an hour of the release of the faulty pattern file, an updated corrected version was released.
Good going, quick acting from the Avast! dev team.

should never have even happened in the first place. Sloppy coding. I'm pretty strict. I don't give second chances to losers.

Besides Avast was never really highly rated in the first place. Educate yourself. Do some googling for anti-virus reviews.

 

[howardb]

While I agree that the release was general balls up from Avast, it's still an excellent free AV! I'm sticking with it, as I've tried some other commercial ones over the years and they were pretty useless at detection (aka McAfee, Symantic, Norton, etc.) - I gave up with them and went "free"

we deleted everything it said was a trojan and now it seems several critical system files (it no longer want to start up) were deleted in this process.

*confused* Isn't this why the user is prompted to either repair, delete or move to the chest? Delete should be the very last resort - if a file cannot be repaired, then move it to the chest. I have my Avast set up to do this automatically when a possible virus is found. This enables me to check the validity first before deleting the file(s).

Only safe mode is working now .../... So now we are stuck, the lappie isn't critical but is important...

Have you tried a system restore or a repair from the CD? What O/S are you running on your lappie?

 

[AirWolf]

While I agree that the release was general balls up from Avast, it's still an excellent free AV! I'm sticking with it, as I've tried some other commercial ones over the years and they were pretty useless at detection (aka McAfee, Symantic, Norton, etc.) - I gave up with them and went "free"



*confused* Isn't this why the user is prompted to either repair, delete or move to the chest? Delete should be the very last resort - if a file cannot be repaired, then move it to the chest. I have my Avast set up to do this automatically when a possible virus is found. This enables me to check the validity first before deleting the file(s).



Have you tried a system restore or a repair from the CD? What O/S are you running on your lappie?

On the commercial side, you wasted your time if you didn't try Nod32.

 

[howardb]

On the commercial side, you wasted your time if you didn't try Nod32.

In all honesty, I only recently heard about Nod32

I've also tried most others out there - AVG was raved about on the reviews a while back, so I took a chance and installed - PC ran for about 2 hours before AVG deleted ALL my non-infected program exe's on my D drive, as the default settings were applied on first-time boot scan! Never went back to it!

I think some of these AV vendors need to do a bit more work on their default settings, for the "normal" users out there - take an average-Joe-noob who gets his/her first PC or installs his first AV - what the heck is going to happen the first time a virus pop-up occurs and he thinks "Mmm, let me delete this"? Have you seen some of those settings? Can be totally misunderstood, even by a regular PC user...

 

[mister]

lol.. the idiots flagged all applications written in Delphi!

 

[happychappy]

While I agree that the release was general balls up from Avast, it's still an excellent free AV! I'm sticking with it, as I've tried some other commercial ones over the years and they were pretty useless at detection (aka McAfee, Symantic, Norton, etc.) - I gave up with them and went "free"



*confused* Isn't this why the user is prompted to either repair, delete or move to the chest? Delete should be the very last resort - if a file cannot be repaired, then move it to the chest. I have my Avast set up to do this automatically when a possible virus is found. This enables me to check the validity first before deleting the file(s).



Have you tried a system restore or a repair from the CD? What O/S are you running on your lappie?

Let me just clear some things up, it was not really "we" it was a family member

usually he chooses repair, but in this instance because it alerted him of so "many" he chose to delete them.

I only realized what was happening when I was doing a boot scan to remove the "trojan" killing the laptop... I googled the trojan and found the avast website.

besides even if the program is free you never expect it to go insane and start destroying your os

did a system restore, no luck... did scan disk, repair from windows cd and I tried in safe mode to scan the hdd with a file recovery suite...

nothing... think the anti virus whipes the files with 0's ;(

 

[NoRulez]

While I agree that the release was general balls up from Avast, it's still an excellent free AV! I'm sticking with it, as I've tried some other commercial ones over the years and they were pretty useless at detection (aka McAfee, Symantic, Norton, etc.) - I gave up with them and went "free"
*confused* Isn't this why the user is prompted to either repair, delete or move to the chest? Delete should be the very last resort - if a file cannot be repaired, then move it to the chest. I have my Avast set up to do this automatically when a possible virus is found. This enables me to check the validity first before deleting the file(s).
Have you tried a system restore or a repair from the CD? What O/S are you running on your lappie?

+1

should never have even happened in the first place. Sloppy coding. I'm pretty strict. I don't give second chances to losers.
Besides Avast was never really highly rated in the first place. Educate yourself. Do some googling for anti-virus reviews.

I've been using Nod32 on my server and office machines for over 3 years and it picks up much more "false positives" than Avast! which has been running on my laptop for an equally long period.
As for educating with Google, that was the very first thing I did when my Avast! popped up for the first time in almost 6 months - hence the knowledge of the problem they experienced for the first time in years...

 

[AirWolf]

+1


I've been using Nod32 on my server and office machines for over 3 years and it picks up much more "false positives" than Avast! which has been running on my laptop for an equally long period.
As for educating with Google, that was the very first thing I did when my Avast! popped up for the first time in almost 6 months - hence the knowledge of the problem they experienced for the first time in years...

BS. I've got it on my laptop and on the office pc, and I've never had any problems with Nod32 picking up files incorrectly. If is really that bad why are you still using it?

 

[LazyLion]

+1


I've been using Nod32 on my server and office machines for over 3 years and it picks up much more "false positives" than Avast! which has been running on my laptop for an equally long period.
As for educating with Google, that was the very first thing I did when my Avast! popped up for the first time in almost 6 months - hence the knowledge of the problem they experienced for the first time in years...

that just confirms my perception of your knowledge of anti-virus programs

 

[Abe]

BS. I've got it on my laptop and on the office pc, and I've never had any problems with Nod32 picking up files incorrectly. If is really that bad why are you still using it?

It happened with our software. You try and convince NOD that there is nothing wrong with your software. They plain ignore you. The only way we were able to resolve it was to sign the executable.