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Bad BitDefender Update Clobbers Windows PCs

Posted by Soulskill on from the it-actually-dispatches-a-man-with-a-bat dept.

alphadogg writes "Users of the BitDefender antivirus software started flooding the company's support forums Saturday, apparently after a faulty antivirus update caused 64-bit Windows machines to stop working. The company acknowledged the issue in a note explaining the problem. 'Due to a recent update it is possible that BitDefender detects several Windows and BitDefender files as infected with Trojan.FakeAlert.5,' the company said. The acknowledgment came after BitDefender users had logged hundreds of posts on the topic. Some complained of being unable to reboot their systems."

4 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. How Appropriate by Nemyst · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Valid files detected as "FakeAlert"? Wow, irony DOES go a long way.

  2. what incompetent boobs by FudRucker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    you would think they would at least test updates on a few different systems (including the 64 bit systems) before releasing it to customers

    --
    Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
  3. How many times does this happen? by khasim · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And why hasn't the "security industry" started to validate hashes and signatures and checksums on KNOWN GOOD FILES yet?

    Seriously. Identifying the safe files is easier than identifying the infected ones.

  4. The cure is worse than the disease by FoolishOwl · · Score: 4, Insightful

    One of the things that precipitated my move to Linux was the way Kaspersky -- at the time, the top-rated security suite -- was shutting down my LAN. There were lots of posts on the official forums complaining about the problem, a handful of useless responses from users guessing at which part of the suite might be the source of the problem, and about which of the undocumented menu options might disable that part of the suite, and one short, incomprehensible message from one of the developers, suggesting they were looking into the problem, from several months before.

    My experience with security software for Windows is that they bog down the operating system, disable basic features of the operating system without warning, and cause frequent crashes -- the very problems that they warn malicious software may cause. Simply put, malicious software *may* cause problems for Windows, but most third-party security software *will*.

    To Microsoft's credit, they finally sealed some of the fundamental security holes with Vista and Windows 7, and they offer a decent security suite for free, so there's really no longer any reason to buy one of these wretched third-party security suites.

    On the whole, though, you'll still get better security by switching to Linux, or at least Mac OS X.