Computer Associates confirmed that its eTrust Antivirus software incorrectly tagged a part of Windows Server 2003 as malware for several hours Friday.
According to a technical note on its support site, CA said that eTrust Antivirus 7.0, 7.1, and 8.0 were updated with a skewed definition file last week that wrongly sniffed out Windows' LSASS service as the "Lassrv.b" virus.
By quarantining the service's "lsass.exe" executable, the virus update caused servers to crash, and in some cases made them unusable.
CA posted instructions on its support site for users whose Windows Server 2003 systems would not reboot, not even in Safe mode. It also issued a corrected definition file, dubbed "30.3.3056," to replace and fix the error.
Although commonplace, anti-virus false positives usually don't impact widely-used software, but rather little-known applications or games. In some cases, however, poor quality definition updates have caused major problems. In March, for example, a McAfee update erroneously flagged hundreds of legitimate files as malware and broke popular programs such as Microsoft Excel.
|
Symantec's Code Red: The Law Enforcement/Anonymous E-Mail Exchange Law enforcement officials negotiated via e-mail for more than two weeks with an Anonymous group member trying to extort $50,000 from Symantec to keep stolen product code off the Internet. |
|
How To Sell IT Security Services To Your Customers Cyberattacks can cost a business thousands, even millions, of dollars, and can deal a death blow to some. Here's how IT solution providers can help guard against malicious attacks. |
|
Cybersecurity Experts: What They Know Could Scare You A recent report based on interviews with security experts in government, business and academia finds more than half in agreement that a worldwide arms race is taking place in cyberspace. |
 More
Slide Shows |
- Insider Threats: The Next Frontier for Security Resellers and SMBs
- Complete Security and Your Bottom Line: Sophos, Value and the Channel
- Tough Threats, Tougher Security: How You Can Leverage New Solutions To Combat A “Targeted Attack” Landscape
- Dark Clouds Ahead: Why the Mid-Market Needs To Ramp Up Cloud Security and How You Can Help Them Get There
