Avast Antivirus Has Gone Mad

[Broni]

It happened to me yesterday....

http://www.dslreport...Gone-Mad-105773

Antivirus program suddenly sees false positives everywhere...



While it veers astray from our normal subject matter of broadband-related news, users in our security forum are indicating that Avast antivirus appears to have gone seriously off of the rails. According to users, the application has suddenly decided to flag many safe applications, freshly-downloaded files and dlls as malicious, wreaking havoc on user systems.


It appears that the program is flagging a number of files used by entirely normal programs such as Skype, Spybot Search and Destroy and other programs incorrectly as the Win32elf-MZG trojan.

Avast's official forums are currently being crushed by the sudden onslaught of traffic created by confused users, many of whom are being told that generic program files are a security threat. Impacted users should uninstall the program or disable the file shield functionality of the application until a fix is issued, lest they delete necessary files on the advice of an anti-virus program gone mad. Avast, which just celebrated the addition of its 100,000,000th user, is in for a very busy night.

Needless to say, your copy of Microsoft Paint is not a virus, regardless of what Avast is currently telling you.

Update Avast has posted a statement to their forum saying they've fixed the problem.

[jmtjet]

Thanks for the heads up Broni. I have Avast installed on my Laptop, which I haven't used today. I'll check it out in the morning.

[Broni]

After today's updates (or maybe late last night updates) things seems to be back to normal.
Before that (yesterday), I got several virus warnings, but I knew for sure, those warnings were about 100% legit program files, so I disregarded them.

[HAN]

Also, see this thread for more info... http://discussions.virtualdr.com/sho...d.php?t=242413

BTW, I had my first encounter with this issue yesterday. My aunt and uncle called and said they had a trojan horse. I told them to not touch anything and I'd be right over. Thankfully, they called before doing anything else and no damage occurred. I was grateful they didn't start quarantining everything. Would have made quite a mess...

[Broni]

I got almost mad at my son, because my Avast went nuts right at the moment when I plugged in USB stick, which was used by my son for last couple of hours.
I was almost sure, he played with some torrents and got my USB stick infected.
Surely enough, it was nothing else, but just a coincidence....LOL

[oldskool1964]

Strange I should see this thread some 3 weeks later having just suffered similar issues today. Earlier I was using yahoo messenger and webcam, all the ads had avast telling me I had a virus. Had a feeling it was false alarms so basically clicked delete (the offending file was in temp internet folder) and carried on. Just had an update from avast and all seems well again. Just thought I'd mention it in case anyone else had the same problems today.

[fink]

I had a couple of warnings about banner ads yesterday but none so far today.

[Le Boule]

http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=52727.0