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Norton Internet Security crits World of Warcraft, claims its not a critical system file
In news that makes McAfee's svchost.exe mishap look like a sunny, smiley walk in the park, Symantec and its Norton suite of security tools has found World of Warcraft to be malware. Countless installations of World of Warcraft were destroyed until it was rapidly fixed on Thursday last week.In fairness, it was quite an easy mistake to make: Symantec uses human analysts to flag programs with suspicious activity, and what's more suspicious than an EXE that runs non-stop for between 16 and 48 hours?
But sadly, I kid: it wasn't WoW.exe that got detected as malware. Rather, it was (presumably) the World of Warcraft Launcher.
Product Manager Kevin Haley said the file was 'analyzing the computer system, making it look suspicious' -- but the irony is (and this is beautiful): the WoW Launcher scans your system to make sure no malware is installed! The Launcher is there to prevent malware and trojans from logging your WoW password, or otherwise interfere with your gaming!
Smooth, Symantec -- maybe do a little more contextual research before flagging files?
[via Neowin]
Comments
9
Subscribe to comments216Jun 7th 2010 9:34AM
More evidence that Norton is really a virus that advertises itself as an Anti-Virus
cybJun 7th 2010 9:48AM
actually this is probably due to the warden built into wow that monitors other processes
Sebastian AnthonyJun 7th 2010 10:13AM
Ya, I thought about that -- but the article says it wasn't WoW, but 'a part of the game'. I took that to mean the Launcher, or the Updater maybe... (but unlikely)
hazardJun 7th 2010 11:05AM
I think it's fair to say the WoW is malware - it does have a body count.
But really, this Snafu is hardly a scratch on McAfee's Fubar.
GregJun 7th 2010 4:47PM
Antivirus makes usually tell their users not to use more than one antivirus program on a system, so if WoW was acting like an antivirus program, it makes a kind of sense that Norton would mistakenly think its malware.
SleepyJun 7th 2010 9:28PM
Are you seriously considering this to be as bad as the McAfee screwup? Get real. They are no way in the same league. This is a mild screwup compared to McAfee. The McAffee screwup messed up thousands of PCs. That had to be repaired manually, PC by PC. This entry doesn't say anything about how many PCs were affected so I bet it was rather small. Plus, it probably was fixed via an update which the McAfee screwup couldn't since it killed network access on the PC.
Sebastian AnthonyJun 8th 2010 6:43AM
No one cares about the gamers :(
Just you watch... in a few generations, just like the blacks and yellows and other ethnicities, GAMERS WILL MATTER.
Rogue_RatJun 8th 2010 7:47AM
It's not that nobody cares about the gamers, it's that people care more about the hundreds of thousands of businesses that were interrupted for 24 hours when McCrapee screwed up.
Sebastian AnthonyJun 8th 2010 8:03AM
Think about the raids! The EPICS!