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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)."

7 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. Update by nate_in_ME · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I actually submitted this yesterday...updates in the Apple discussion thread make it sound like everything is back to normal.

  2. Conspiracy! by girlintraining · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's a conspiracy! Or... maybe it's just that the definition for the virus in question was rushed out the door without adequate testing. How many new viruses are reported each week again? They probably don't "beta test" their definitions, and just do it in a lab. Oops. The lab machines didn't have iTunes.

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    1. Re:Conspiracy! by makomk · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Perhaps. iTunes also uses a bunch of highly obfuscated code with anti-reverse engineering protections, which probably increases its odds of being detected as suspicious.

  3. Re:Why the heck is this news? by nate_in_ME · · Score: 5, Interesting
    If you read through the discussion on the Apple forums, you will probably be(I know I was) surprised at how many people uninstalled iTunes out of fear of it being infected. Of course, there were just as many that uninstalled AVG in order to keep their iTunes work.

    So, while those of us here may know all about how common false positives, etc. are with AV software, reading through the now 20+ pages on Apple's site shows that the majority of iTunes users don't have the knowledge that we do.

  4. Avastly superior antivirus... by kms_one · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My antivirus is Avastly superior to AVG, but I don't use iTunes anyway. Sansa ftw.

  5. Re:Had This Problem Myself by Billhead · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I tried Avira on two computers two months ago, and on one it was constantly trying to access the floppy drive, and that seems to be a known problem.

    I'm not going to bother installing it on my other computers to see if it works, I'm going with NOD32.

  6. False positive on a DLL? That is nothing ... by kbahey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    False positive from a DLL? That is nothing ...

    How about TrendMicro giving a false positive on a valid PHP plain text file that is part of Drupal!

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