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Panda Antivirus Flags Itself As Malware
An anonymous reader writes An update to a number of Panda antivirus programs Wednesday mistakenly flagged core files as malware, putting them in quarantine. In doing so, the antivirus system ceased working. Panda's free antivirus, retail 2015 service, and its enterprise cloud-based antimalware service are all affected. The company took to Twitter to warn users: "Please, don't reboot PCs. We'll keep you posted." In an advisory, Panda said the erroneous signature file was "repaired immediately," but warned under certain conditions it is possible for the "incident to persist."
Oh aye, they did a good job of trying to sweep this one under the rug. If you rebooted any computer afflicted with this before the fix was deployed, you had a solid chance of rendering your system unbootable. With Panda broken, Windows often will not start. And even if it does start, Panda would swallow up several core system files, leaving you with a rather unusable system. We had several customers with dozens of workstations running Panda, and the first thing they thought to do was of course a reboot.
In some cases, Panda even requested a reboot to complete its hari kari.
Systems that were not rebooted were unusable while Panda held everything up.
Of course, Panda later released a tool to fix that if you rebooted your system. But it only really works if you can boot into, at a minimum, safe mode. But I still find it very hard to believe that if they were testing these updates that this would have happened. I have a feeling a chain of technicians got complacent about this, and a string of managerial staff is probably going to get fired as a result. I know they're not the only company to screw up an update like this, but this really is quite nonsensical.
The way it crashed was to halt and quarantine every running process. This lead to endless individual program crashes and attempts to run programs throwing "perimeter incorrect", which looks just like what happens with ransomware. Another possible side effect (one that I experienced) is a "This copy of Windows is not valid" on reboot and failed Windows updates. Anyone not running Panda will laugh but this mistake resulted in a LOT of lost man-hours for a lot of people out there. Because I trust the company I, for one, lost four weeks of work due to not backing up properly and using an encryption program that kept Windows Repair from working properly. I'm still running Panda: I think they'll learn from the mistake. But one more fuckup and I won't. Also I'm no longer recommending the program.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Long time ago I had a co-worker who made a mistake where he lost a lot of un-recoverable data. He went in to our boss to offer his resignation. My boss said "Hell no! I just paid $100,000 for you to learn that lesson, so now I need you to make sure that kind of thing can't happen again."
John