avast! Antivirus detecting false positives

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Lawndart
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avast! Antivirus detecting false positives

Post by Lawndart » Wed Dec 02, 2009 9:10 pm

Heads up for anyone using avast! Antivirus:

Today it began detecting false positives with the newest update. In other words, avast! is detecting viruses in files it shouldn't. I had several programs stopped because it detected a trojan horse (Win32:Delf-MZG[trj]).

avast! recommended I do a boot scan and I noticed that same trojan was coming up in all my scans and placing them in the quarantine chest. I stopped the avast! scan to prevent everything (!) being placed in the chest and went to their forums for help. The avast! forum is starting to collect messages from a lot of people today with the same problem, and this just started for me after the avast! program/database was updated.

It seems the problem is with avast! and not any other program or file. I suppose it's just naming tons of false positives. Good thing I stopped the scan before everything ended up in quarantine on my computer!

I'm sure this will be fixed very soon, but until then DO NOT follow avast!'s recommendation to quarantine your (uninfected) files!
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Tailhook
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Post by Tailhook » Wed Dec 02, 2009 10:17 pm

Now that is ironic...

I THINK, but I don't know for sure, but I just manually got rid of the trojan 'win32.mebroot.bz/k'. Completely ticked me off. It took over my MBR and kept putting a different user in control and kept turning on Remote Control in Windows Firewall. It would cause Windows to freeze but was still able to move the mouse and scroll a website.

Everything so far for me is going great. Browser and computer hasn't locked up yet, folders arn't re-appearing, and it doesn't take my computer 10 minutes to finish booting on the desktop. :D
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Lawndart
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Post by Lawndart » Thu Dec 03, 2009 1:54 am

avast! just released an update and it seems to have fixed the issue.

Kudos to the peeps at ALWIL Software for the quick update!
Deanjr
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Post by Deanjr » Thu Dec 03, 2009 6:21 pm

Thanks for the update Lawndart. I turned on my computer and got the same thing.
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Lawndart
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Post by Lawndart » Wed Jan 13, 2010 1:03 am

Heads up, avast! is detecting false positives again on certain services. Hopefully ALWIL will have an update by morning, but in the meantime do not quarantine or delete your files.
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