Top Antivirus Flags Critical Windows Files as Infected, Quarantines Them

[CrAKeN]

 

Webroot antivirus on Windows

 

Security software developed by Webroot mistakenly flagged critical Windows files as infected and quarantined them after a bad update released by the company on April 24.

 

According to the security vendor itself, the update was pulled after approximately 15 minutes, but this still hasn’t stopped some computers from receiving it, with thousands of systems said to be broken down after antivirus software flagged Windows files signed by Microsoft as malicious.

 

Furthermore, the buggy update also incorrectly blocked access to Facebook after flagging the social network as a phishing website.

 

At the time of publishing this article, Webroot is still working on addressing the issue, though the company has already provided workarounds to prevent the antivirus from re-detecting files as infected.

 

“We are still working to resolve this issue through the night and will keep you updated as soon as more information becomes available,” the company said a few minutes ago.

 

30 million users in 2016

Webroot emphasizes that the false warnings do not come as a result of being hacked, adding that both consumers and businesses are affected and a workaround for MSPs (managed service providers) is still in development.

 

“Webroot has not been breached and customers are not at risk.  Legitimate malicious files are being identified and blocked as normal.  We continue to work on a comprehensive resolution, but a live fix has been released for the Facebook issue and is propagating through to customers now,” the company said, explaining that the whole thing happened because files were flagged as W32.Trojan.Gen.

 

While it’s not yet clear how many users were affected by this bad update, Webroot reported 30 million customers last year, out of which a big part accounted for businesses who are still waiting for a fix at this point.

 

Furthermore, Webroot says that its servers are also working a bit slower than expected because of the big number of requests after the faulty update shipped.

 

“For those that reported that agent commands were not working or were very delayed, that backlog of requests has processed and we are told that it has caught up. For anyone that had failures, please try again,” the firm says.

 

Source

[Petrovic]

Critical Service Announcement
https://www.webroot.com/blog/2017/04/25/critical-service-announcement/

 

[pc71520]

What a mess...