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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.'"
Where I couldn't convince my parents not to use Norton, despite it destroying our family computer at least 6 times.
It has become self aware?
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.
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)
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.
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.
Obligatory Bob the Angry Flower.