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Avira Premium Anti-Virus Bug Disables Windows Machines
New submitter Adesso writes "Anti-virus vendor Avira is having difficulty with an update of all their Premium customers. An update that has been downloaded over 70 million times is causing the 32-bit version of Windows to block almost all critical applications. Avira has responded promptly with an interim solution for this problem. In most cases this causes Windows to not boot properly."
Couldn't we be using Avira at work?
Then I could go home and play Diablo.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Still think this is good advice? Worse is when the vendor forces the update silently w/o informing the user. Then suddenly your PC is broke or browser and you don't know why.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I guess that's one more to add to my list of AV products I recommend against.
But hey, they'll give you a month free subscription for your troubles*.
*Hyperbole, they'll most likely give users nothing.
Cheers!
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
It seems Avira is taking a page out of McAfee's playbook.
When AVG caused a boot failure several years ago I switched started switching everyone who asked to Microsoft Security Essentials; still seems to be the best free one. At work I'm happy with NOD32; I suppose that they could have a similar problem, but they've been really good so far.
Anti-virus programs cannot stop you from getting viruses. They can only react after the fact. Their updates are by necessity reactive: a virus appears, and it takes time to update definition files to detect it.
And even once that happens, once ring0 is compromised on a box, it is not possible to trust that box again without a full OS reinstall. Anti-virus programs can attempt to clean things up, OK for casual web browsing, but not for anything you must trust. The only safe recovery is a reinstall.
The only way to practice safe computing is to *not run malicious software* in the first place. This is fortunately not difficult to do. It does require not volunteering to run any random script that any random web page asks you to run - that's just being an idiot, and you deserve what you get. The only safe model is whitelists for both native software and web scripting / javascript type things. Sure, run your bank's javascript, but don't run ANY javascript from ANY page. Any use model where you run arbitrary things without thinking is doomed to failure, whether they're native applications or "sandboxed" scripts, because the sandboxes are never perfect.
The human brain is the only perfect anti-virus utility in existence.
How does the interim solution get implemented if the machine won't boot?
In ye olden days, if you compiled a new linux kernel, deleted the old one, forgot to run lilo, it doesn't reboot, then the solution was to boot and run lilo, which was a task that separated the men from the boys, err it wasn't that difficult, maybe separated the 7 year olds from the 6 year olds or whatever. Anyway...
Also a note to the editors, that link would have been a million times funnier if it pointed to a ubuntu.com live cdrom/dvd/usb image, or maybe the android-x86 project, which is really quite usable.
"Most people" don't need much more than a working web browser. Even at work, "they" were recently f-ing around with a firewall and managed to block ssh, so I installed ajaxterm to work around that, and I mostly use the webmail page anyway, so all I really need at work is a working browser. I would not want to use ajaxterm on a regular basis 10 hours a day, but its survivable in a pinch until the firewall guys get their stuff together. For example I really enjoy how it floods the logs unless you do extra work....
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Though not nearly as bad. I trialled a small business product designed to make managing your AV/Firewall across multiple computers easy via a central web interface. It was all great in concept, except the default configuration for the individual install blocked itself from communicating with the central service. And while managing everything on the web interface was slick, attempting to fix the configuration on the installs without the benefit of that centralized web interface was a huge pain in the ass. Needless to say, that trial didn't convert to a sale.
Too well.
Have gnu, will travel.
This is a very effective security measure. If your system cannot boot it cannot get infected.
It's a classic case of artificial intelligence vs. human stupidity. The artificial intelligence algorithm employed by Avira for keeping computers secure has determined that the only way to achieve real security for most users it's to turn the PC into a brick. Some people are simply too stupid to wander online unsupervised, so it's for their own protection. If you can restore your computer to normal operation, you have just passed the test and you are worthy of computer access.
Just need to encase the PC in cement and bury it at sea, and then those evil hackers will never be able to get to it! ... of course, that's going to cost you extra....
----
Not to be confused with Col.
I only use Windows to play games (the ones that can cause some issues under Wine), so it wasn't that big a deal. Anyway, I had avira blocking explorer.exe and cmd.exe from running. Luckily they still ran fine if I logged in as administrator, so I just added them to the list of exceptions, and seems to work properly now. At least good enough for my scope, which is playing games. No big loss, though, Skyrim works perfectly fine in Wine....
If you can't fix it, feature it.
At least that is the mantra at my company.
throw the baby out. The bathwater is cold
How have the AV companies not come to realize that they need to have an automated testing lab where they apply the newest update to every variant of Windows and have the machine reboot and then run a test suite? Even basic QA should have caught this level of stupidity. In the six years we ran Trend the only problem we ever had was extreme slowness on our Notes servers, it turns out they didn't have a Notes server in their lab and none of their early adopter program participants were running Notes either. We talked to the head of QA and he assured us that they would add a Notes server to their test environment, that was QA done properly.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
My list of serious bugs in AV products:
Panda (ancient versions) - failed to install correctly, impossible to uninstall. Two botched Windows XP installations.
BitDefender (relatively recent) - very messed-up definition file marked ALL executables as infected, putting them in quarantine. I still have the feeling any malicious executables would not have been marked.
Kaspersky 2012 - screws up Windows Home Server (v.1 and 2011) connector, has to be disabled for backups to work
McAfee - Won't even protect anything if the license has expired. Still bloats up your computer, though.
Norton - everything you've heard is true. It's impossible to uninstall, it's a resource hog, blocks stuff randomly...
The one exception so far is MSE - considering the amount of malware the others have caught so far (less than 10 times, if you count tests as detections), how light it is and how it doesn't piss you off, it's my favorite.
An anti-virus software that gets to the root of the problem! :-)
Does anyone have a quick writeup of what versions of Windows are affected? The...summary...declares "32-bit versions of Windows" - so, just 32-bit - is that everything? Does it stop at XP? What about some poor fool running Windows ME - how is s/he going to cope or does s/he even have to worry? Is it really just 32-bit Windows versions or will this affect a 64-bit Windows install running a 32-bit version of Avira? I really appreciate it when we get a summary with no actual article on it, just links to Avira's forums and website.
....decided the only winners in the game don't play.
That is actually an interesting idea, I wonder how the trolls would abuse it.
And just to be clear, even though it would be abused by trolls, that isn't a reason to not try it.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Nobody has ever produced a single email or a distruntled employee rating out or any other kind of actual hard evidence that any company is paying for comments on slashdot of all places - a mostly irrelevant website in the larger tech world. Although, depending on your level of personal narcisism you might have an overinflated sense of importance of the things that in reality nobody is paying attention to.
THIS. Does anybody out there really think corporations are going to spend real money paying people to argue with anonymous idiots on a site that 99.9% of the population doesn't even know exists? Someone please explain how Slashdot has any sort of "sway" in the consumer electronics industry.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Does the Lite editing cause your machine burst into flames and burn down half your house after posting compromising photos to Facebook?
. . . antivirus software that keeps the Windows virus from spreading!
that recently had Avira anti-virus identify itself as malware:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/26/avira_auto_immune_false_positive/