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Avira Anti-Virus Detects Itself
ddfall writes "After a recent update, Avira's anti-virus software reports its own AESCRIPT.DLL file as a trojan or spyware. From the article: 'The dodgy AntiVir virus definition file was quickly pulled and replaced with a new version – 7.11.16.146 – that resolves the problem, as explained in an official post on Avira's support forum.'"
Dee Dee Dee!
Where I couldn't convince my parents not to use Norton, despite it destroying our family computer at least 6 times.
WTF did you put this in idle for? The place slashcode goes to, well, break.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
We must go deeper!
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
It has become self aware?
on the same scale as this:
Any other fans of Wyrm? :-p
With occurrences like these it's no surprise people sometimes think antivirus and security recommendations consist of 75% FUD and 25% common sense.
How many of us have seen just about every damn thing we download labeled as some kind of trojan or other?
It's commonplace on file sharing sites to see outright mockery of those who raise alarms about the scary alert their AV just popped on those files; that's how bad antivirus programs get.
I understand that sometimes shady files do contain viruses, but nevertheless I've seen claims from major security vendors and from Microsoft that the vast majority of illicit files contain viruses. Seems like I'd have noticed some missing money, some funny things on my credit report, or some suspicious traffic in my router logs if that was true, but they've all been squeaky clean. And I used windows XP SP3 with no firewall or antivirus until this year.
Bottom line, I should be using better protection and it's possible I've had some viruses, but if I did they clearly haven't harmed me yet. And it's still difficult to distinguish the level of actual threats from the hilarious mistakes and massive, obvious disinformation campaigns going on.
And ./ said, "let there be laughter."
And then the masses moved on to the next article.
I have been fighting a virus on my work the last couple of days. It is calling itself McAfee Antivirus Enterprise. The symptoms is it slows my (aging) lab computers to a grinding halt. The last 3 days it has essentially incapacitating them for more than an hour, every day. I hope whatever payload it needed to update is done, so it will stop disrupting experiments by stalling.
We'll soon need to upgrade an old - but still adequate - dedicated lab computer running a single piece of equipment, just because IT have chosen McAfee...
(fyi; If I take it offline I can only log-on a month or so, then it has to connect to the domain, resulting in a torrent of forced updates. Beside we need to be able to retrieve the data, and last time I needed one, no one had an usb stick!).
I mean shouldn't the most rudimentary of unit testing have shown this to be a problem?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
No wait, that was something different.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Avira has this bad habit of detecting some files as malware (e.g. scene game cracks) although they don't exhibit infection. I personally submitted a few of these files to Avira for review and they confirmed no infection is found, but it's an "illegal" modification of a legit file so it stays as flagged for warnings in their VDTs.
Now I'm not a conspiracy theorist but this reeks of shady deals to "reduce" piracy.
I should change my Avira Free antivirus but I'm too lazy to go through a couple restarts and installing something else. Maybe Avast, which I gave up because it had this voice update notification enabled by default and scared me to death one night by yelling at me "VIRUS DEFINITIONS HAVE BEEN UPDATED!".
Also, they don't understand that "Always Ignore" should NOT mean "Ignore for the duration of THIS session only".
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Ouroboros :-D
Geekism is your _only_ God!
Most AVs act like viruses. They can not be terminated, like 10+ hidden processes, scan/modify/delete other files constantly etc.
Have you run Combofix to find what isn't causing you problems but may be sending spam to millions of others?
Last year Avira flagged the ASK toolbar as "malware/spyware".
Fast forward 6 months and not only is ASK toolbar nolonger flagged as malware/spyware but all of a sudden Avira has a partnership with ASK and install it by default and it's a pain in the neck to remove it without getting rid of Avira.
Avira's actually a pretty decent free anti-virus... but they sold their soul to the devil.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Avira saw part of a program (called "Avira") that bombards the user with pop-ups, scaring them, and asking for money every year. It acted accordingly. The only shocking thing here is that it actually worked.
Maybe it just detected the included Trojan ?
In this case I do have to say a bit right on this part. This nowhere near matches the ranks of MSE destroying chrome (subject to suspicion due to companies being rivals), nor is it even remotely on the league of McAffee rendering systems unbootable. Though I do have to say it does say something negative due to it being curious to pass testing. (Microsoft can at least say "Chrome wasn't installed on our machines that we tested it on" and it be a very plausible explanation)
Yep, yawn.
And you thought they'd only build it as a box?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z86V_ICUCD4
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
n/t
I think this just proves that even Avira developers, dont use Avira. Make of that what you will.
I just finished reading this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/us/politics/republicans-push-military-trials-for-terrorism-suspects.html
One wonders what it will take for those who want to suspend social and legal traditions because of an attack on freedom, to recognize that it is they who are destroying our freedom.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This joke seems to need explaination so here it goes...
Norton Ghost is a discontinued drive replication program that was loved by sys admins to copy exact drive states so any hacked machine could be simply restored to a state where it was known to be good. Other tools have taken over since then, and that's why the program went away.
Now it also needs to detect those other viruses: Mcafee and Norton.
It's sad that most AV software is worse then the problem it generally fails to prevent, but it's true.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Obligatory Bob the Angry Flower.
For how long though? With so many non-traditional computer devices being embedded with Linux flavours- how long until more and more people start targeting Linux.
A virus that leaps from your phone to your cable box to your computer to you thermostat to your electric car would not be fun.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Holy recursion, Batman!
Most anti-virus programs behave like viruses themselves.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Yeah, because it detects jack-shit!
Remember when we joked about MS, the company who couldn't keep its own shit secure for decades, bringing out "security software"?
Also, you pulled that "highest-rated" right out of your ass. I see them constantly getting the "40% detection rate? Wow, this must be a joke! FAIL!" prize in any comparison since it came out.
I use Linux, what is a virus, and an anti-virus?
MSE has terrible ratings, please do some research before parroting what you've heard. Check the VB100 scores.
I'm confused, I submitted this story (as it says) and it was accepted - http://slashdot.org/submission/1829554/avira-anti-virus-detects-itself - however, the version that's gone onto the front page of /. has had the source changed from The H (http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Avira-anti-virus-detects-itself-1367055.html) to The Register (which did the story later in the day). The text in the submission is the same / what I had but the original source has been removed. What was the reason for this?
sandboxie is a great program to use when trying to explorer some "shady" files or programs.
Having worked for an AV company a while ago (not Avira, before anyone asks), that excuse is actually pretty plausible for AV companies, too. It's rather unlikely that you have your own product installed on your analysis boxes. For very obvious reasons, if you think about it...
It is a big blooper, though, to NOT have your current product in your whitelist testbox.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It proves that Avira analysts don't have the AV kit installed on the machines used to analyze malware. Now, why could they possibly do something like this? Maybe to avoid having their analysis target being deleted underneath their fingers by the AV kit?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I got 20+ viruses despite having Security Essentials installed and updated. There were times when SE was leaking memory fast so I had to restart it. And sometimes, after an update it kept nagging with "Restart now!" messages every 5 minutes.
I won't advise it to anyone. My solution? Switch to Ubuntu.
Before switching to Windows 7, my last XP PC lasted for 3 years without any antivirus. I have done it by disabling usb autorun and using firefox with adblock and flashblock AND most importantly controlling the urge to click on the dancing bunnies ad links. But casual users don't think before clicking those links. That is the main problem.
General
Hardware
Oriented
System
Transfer
I actually used ghost before symantec bought it. I feel like a hipster sysadmin....
-ted