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Avast has a freak out, goes on a false positive spree
Earlier this morning, we received a tip from a developer that his office encountered a rather serious issue: Avast started detecting all binaries created with Delphi as malware - a gigantic problem if you happen to be developing Delphi apps in-house.
At first it looked like an isolated incident, but it now appears to be anything but. Avast's user forums [update] have been getting hammered for several hours by users experiencing the same thing - a rash of false positives following a recent definition update.
It's the same sort of SNAFU that went down a few months back with AVG -- which blackballed iTunes after an update. A second update quickly fixed the problem, and that will likely be the case with Avast as well.
If you use Avast and are experiencing this problem, it's wouldn't hurt to do a few manual update checks this morning to see if new bits have been made available.
update: a new .vps has been pushed, so manually update Avast if you're still having problems.
At first it looked like an isolated incident, but it now appears to be anything but. Avast's user forums [update] have been getting hammered for several hours by users experiencing the same thing - a rash of false positives following a recent definition update.
It's the same sort of SNAFU that went down a few months back with AVG -- which blackballed iTunes after an update. A second update quickly fixed the problem, and that will likely be the case with Avast as well.
If you use Avast and are experiencing this problem, it's wouldn't hurt to do a few manual update checks this morning to see if new bits have been made available.
update: a new .vps has been pushed, so manually update Avast if you're still having problems.
Comments
23
Subscribe to commentsBenjieDec 3rd 2009 1:06PM
They really should have those ignore buttons... I know it was false positive because it only went out as a malware this morning. But still i had to uninstall it, download another exe from filehippo and cnet just to make sure if it was really a malware.
phxjwDec 4th 2009 12:36AM
I've always been pleased with Avast's performance but this recent hiccup threw me for a loop. No major problems but a file or two on my thumb drive came up with false positives. I had uploaded them to virustotal.com and they were verified as "clean". Thinking Avast had gone totally screwy, i uninstalled, went with Microsoft Security Essentials but that slowed my computer down to a crawl. Uninstalled that and re-installed Avast and this time it worked fine with no false positives. I can only assume the updates and been corrected by that time. I'm back with Avast now and hope this inconvenience doesn't occur again.
gwilljonesDec 5th 2009 4:04AM
Overnight I have lost the Wireless icon in the System Tray and also the Micronet Wireless Network Utility icon in the System Tray.
However, I am still able to get onto the Internet. Hopefully this will cure itself next time that I boot.
Gwill Jones