Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

AVG Update Breaks iTunes

Posted by kdawson on from the one-man's-virus-is-another-man's-music dept.

nate_in_ME writes "After getting a positive from the AVG virus detector while playing music on iTunes just a few minutes ago, I did a bit of research. It appears that AVG has recently pushed an update to the virus definitions that flags every iPod/iTunes related file as being infected with the 'Small.BOG' trojan. Interestingly enough, AVG does not have any information on this particular virus in their virus encyclopedia. Discussion on the Apple forum is up to 4 pages and climbing. One user there had an interesting thought: 'Maybe Palm has some shares in AVG...MUAHAAAA!!' (on page 3)."

3 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. Had This Problem Myself by Jucius+Maximus · · Score: 5, Informative

    It does not appear to flag "every" file related to iTunes, it is just the iTunesMiniPlayer.dll.

    The workaround is to disable the real-time scanner.

    However their latest update had fixed it, and my real-time scanner is running again without problem.

    1. Re:Had This Problem Myself by adolf · · Score: 5, Informative

      I like Avast quite a bit. It's generally fast, problem-free, and stays the hell out of the way.

      Or at least, it stays out of the way once you do a few things to it:

      Tell it to turn off all sounds and notifications of normalcy. And to automatically accept all new program and definition updates. And to never to bother to ask to reboot the computer (it's a Windows desktop -- it'll be rebooted soon enough for othe reasons, anyway).

      After that, it just sits quietly on the taskbar unless things go awry somehow.

      --
      Kid-proof tablet..
  2. This is a problem with AV in general. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I work at a AV vendor (not one of the big ones), and false positives are a big problem. Essentially there are two issues. First, how severe is the threat? You might skimp on your validation process in order to get something out sooner. Second (and much harder to resolve), there is effectively an infinite amount of software out there; on top of that, there may also be many different versions (iTunes 6, 7, 8, point releases, etc). You try to do the best you can, but shit happens because you can only test against so much software.