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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
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.
How the fuck is it possible you haven't been institutionalized yet?
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'
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?
No, the antivirus just became self aware, and then immediately committed suicide out of disgust.
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.