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Bad BitDefender Update Clobbers Windows PCs
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."
Valid files detected as "FakeAlert"? Wow, irony DOES go a long way.
They could have claimed it was all a part of a mock cyber-attack! Oh joy!
Its a new security paradigm. The newly locked down computer will not run anything, and therefore no virii, malware, bots, or solitaire, will run. Truly they've created the "most secure antivirus ever".
Or maybe they should have put up a payment screen on their site, "We're sorry, your antivirus subscription has expired. To prevent your computer from being exposed to malware and virii, we have taken the proactive step of disabling your computer until you have made payment. For the low renewal fee plus a small reactivation fee of $199, we will be happy to walk you through the re-enablement process. Have a nice secure day!"
BitDefender is a third party anti-virus package.
This actually happened to me, at first I couldn't log in with my password, had to use Bart's PE disc to reset that, then I couldn't get any icons on my desktop of use the start button, then just a black screen, I thought I had a virus for real, so I reformatted , this was yesterday, wish I could have seen this but I don't know how they would have reversed it anyway.
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
Anticlobber software. To protect your computer against misbehaving antivirus software.
The shame is that even though you put so much time into that post, you didn't bother knowing what the fuck you were talking about.
"His name was James Damore."
This happened to me, too... bitdefender would flag nearly any file, and it first flagged a file that I had just updated, so I was genuinely concerned. The next file is flagged, however, was usbstor.sys, so I knew the AV was probably wrong.
Some people were running virus scans... tens of thousands of false detection, and all of the files were quarantined or deleted... it was a really bad situation for many. I'm not sure how non-technical users fared.
I use bitdefender on my computer only - I like the aggressive detection capabilities and reporting options. However, no one else in my house wants to know what their AV is doing - they just want it to work - and bitdefender is probably the worst option for them.
Quick, someone send Microsoft a 64 bit version of Vista and Windows 7.
BitDefender and Windows Defender are two different things.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Another Antivirus software package (COMODO) has caused problems of this nature for me at work - it updated, asked to reboot and on rebooting we were just presented with a black screen, the desktop wouldn't load. Fortunately we were able to reboot into safe mode and just uninstall it until there was an update issued, but it was still part of a morning lost... While it's impossible to test every configuration ever, I'd have thought that something that would affect EVERY system in an office using this software should have been picked up during testing... Well you learn from your mistakes. If it happens again, there will be hell to pay, I'm sure.
Well, you really don't need a 3rd party security application to make your machine secure. We just saw the other day http://ask.slashdot.org/story/10/03/18/1831246/What-Free-Antivirus-Do-You-Install-On-Windows that many people have good things to say about MS Security Essentials as an anti-virus program. As advanced users, we also all know what the weak link is: end users who click on and run any old thing. Honestly, take a modern version of Windows (Vista or Windows 7) and the out of box (and on by default) firewall coupled with the automatic "run programs as a standard user even if you are an administrator" (UAC) and Windows itself isn't "insecure" like it was in the days of Windows XP. This is why current attacks are mostly social engineering / trojan ("run this for free stuff!" or "enter your password here"), or instead application level attacks (Adobe Reader, IE, Firefox). Gone are the days of the Blaster type "you are owned if your machine is just on the network" attacks. Even the most recent SMBv2 vulnerability and subsequent attacks required that you modified your default firewall settings to allow serving files from your machine.
There really isn't a need for a 3rd party product here and the major ones (McAfee, Symantec, etc.) slow your machine and act like malware themselves.
If anything, user education about what they should trust and what they can safely run goes much farther than anti-virus or anti-malware can.
Thats the motto of my life my friend.
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.
The real irony here is, that you even NEED a 3rd party application to make your machine secure.
It doesn't even do that. The third party application takes time to react to new viruses so can never do more than reduce the insecurity.
Flash is a huge security nightmare. Maybe BitDefender was doing the right thing there.
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.