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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."
Yow! I'm malware.
Well spotted, panda.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I heard you like antivirus so I put a virus in your antivirus so you can antivirus while you virus
Pretty ironic and makes for great headlines, but this *has* to be a major embarrassment.
Shouldn't Panda's product test organization be fired as a matter of course?
I can't see how this kind of bug got through release testing - shouldn't release testing ensure that the product runs after update?
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
http://images.fanpop.com/image...
Any anti-virus should quarantine its virus signature database, by definition.
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.
Attack on a anti virus itself!
"Okay, who farted?"
Table-ized A.I.
How the fuck is it possible you haven't been institutionalized yet?
Timecube!
If Java ever gets true garbage collection, 90% of the programs would delete themselves.
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.
Last time I used panda for what was just supposed to be an online scan, it went and changed a lot of settings on all of my web browsers, causing no small headache to put back to where they were, even after the software had been removed from my computer. That was about 4 years ago. I haven't used Panda since.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Yep, a customer of ours got hit with this, not only did Panda shit the bed, but it *let everything that was quarantined out* causing massive infections to spread across the entire network.... We're still cleaning it up 2 days later.
Is that anti-virus have way to much false positives and they don't care.
Is this the first Anti-Virus to become intelligent, self-aware that it is actually a virus and then, finally, grow depressed and commit suicide?
You'd think AV companies would at least dump there signature to group of test machines running the past few releases of their product and on popular OS combinations and at least put them through a reboot. It should be easy and quick to script that out on any visualization platform.
15 years ago, I would have given them a pass because doing really complete QA would have more than likely add significant lag time to pushing signatures making A/V more useless than it already is/was. Now days though it should be possible to do in easily, with VMs and dev-ops techniques.
This kinda thing should tell you the company is completely inept.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Yet another word misappropriated by less-than-savvy journalists.
Actually, the phrase "less-than-savvy journalists" is redundant. Apologies.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
Well, TFA doesn't surprise me at all.
I owned Panda decades ago and here's the steps I did when I decided to wipe it out from my system:
1 - Format PC
2 - Install MS-DOS 6.22
3 - Install Windows 95
4 - Install Panda (don't remember what number it was)
5 - Create Panda Antivirus Floppy Disks
6 - Reboot and run the floppy disks
And here's when the antivirus detected a infected file inside Panda installation (obviously, nothing else in the system).
That's when I lost faith in antivirus...
No, the antivirus just became self aware, and then immediately committed suicide out of disgust.
The timecube domain is for sale. No word on whether the buyer gets to keep the crazy though.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Did somebody forget to test their new defs before posting? :P
To those who think it's strange that an antivirus can be detected as a virus or other malware. They have definitions of the what they seek, and yes, those look like the same thing they look for, so yes, they can easily flag on those if the programmers aren't careful.
Also, to be effective, they have to use certain techniques that are done by almost no software other than various malwares and antivirus programs, so again, a false positive is easy and the programmers must take special care to avoid that.
I guess somebody at Panda forgot all that and neglected to test.
I'm beginning to like Agile. I don't have to wait 2 months to find out my next release is being delayed another 2 months. In Agile I get disappointed every two weeks.
This is not sarcasm. My users now get told their fix will be in weeks, not months, and no finding out 2 months later that's another 2 months. Yes, they still wait 2 months, but it feels better. To them.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The Panda Virus checker has run, and confirmed that all installed Viruses including Panda, are functioning correctly.
Hey APK.. you only get to say something when you actually write a piece of software that does not need a 3 year education for the operator to work with it, and... err... you know.. .actually works, instead of just taking 100% cpu for 4 hours. when the same can be achieved with curl/wget, bash, grep, sort and cat under Cygwin in less than 3 minutes....
Your software does not work
and I feel all kinds of empathy for everyone in this situation. The problem is, when you're trying to stop 0 day malware you have to work and release samples rapidly to protect your users. Developing a flawless battery of tests is tricky, and now and then a sample can slip through. The last time this happened at my company the sample was caught after 27 minutes, but 27 minutes can do a lot of damage when you have millions of users. It took a lot of personal phone calls from everyone in the company to make that right with our customers. Where humans are involved, mistakes are made, and while ideally this would never happen; loosing core OS files is still better than having your entire hard drive encrypted.
In Soviet Russia, own foot shoots YOU!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Our third major release in 18 months is going out in two weeks. We have not yet sunk into the quicksand.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It's become self aware
them final thoughts.. those sad thoughts when process realise that to evil and must leave:( "I think, therefore I spam. :( " # *NOP NOP NOP NOP NOP NOP 's ... into the next world*
Lest we forget, Sad Pand || a.
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SITREP:
Panda got bashed. No street cred. Panda got no rodents to tickle, panda did make decision poor :( Wants new start but nobody is listening. Panda look to God for help but meaningless echoes.