BitDefender AV gone Berzerk today, turn it OFF!

[Snacko]

I use BitDefender Internet Security for my AV and Firewall. Today it marked over 65000 files infected with trojan.fakealert.5 virus. It quarentined windows system files as well as it's own BitDefender files. For now the recommendation is to turn off automatic updates and disable your antivirus. If you have this AV I suggest you turn it off immediatly and check out this thread:

http://forum.bitdefender.com/index.php?showtopic=18759&st=0

They say a fix is comeing. But I am on my old Dell at the moment. My new rig is hosed until they have a fix. And I don't know how BitDefender is going to fix itself with it is broken to begin with. Maybe a separate download?

Argg...

[B16Enk]

May not be isolated to just bit defender Andy.

Spoke to my brother this morning, his Shield app (not one I am familiar with but that is allegedly it's name) did a similar thing and pooched his 2008 install.

He's now picking out the bits and preparing to install Windows 7.

Wonder if this is a new Trojan/Virus?

[Snacko]

So far I have not heard BitDefender say it was a virus. They have indicated that it was a bad virus definition that began when the program did it's autoupdate. For me, this all started about ten minutes till noon yesterday. (BitDefender also recorded the last update at that time I found out later.) Virus started popping up, so it recommend I do a scan. I started the scan and went to lunch. When I got back it had identified over 65,000 infected files and suggested I disinfect them, which I did. Then it said they could not be disinfected and suggested that I quaentine them. But I knew I could not run Windows with half of it's files quarentined, so that was when I started looking online.

Luckily, I had a good Acronis Backup image from about a month ago, and also several incremental backups. Plus, I keep my My documents, and Outlook Personal Folders files all on a separate drive. So, I am good to go. I lost very little. Luckily I was prepared.

As Foghorn Leghorn says:

http://www.mcneel.com/users/jb/foghorn/foghorn7.wav

[Streak]

I'm using Bit Defender and have not had any of this happen.

It is time for me to do my weekly scan though, and now I'm a bit leery of doing it.

[Snacko]

It only affected the 64 bit version Streak.

Read about it here:

http://forum.bitdefender.com/index.php?showtopic=18789

If you do have a 64bit XP, Vista, or Win7 (I have Win7), be careful. I'm pretty sure it was just a bad definition file, and they have remove/replaced it with a good one. But I would turn off Real-Time AV Protection and AutoUpdate. Then after reading the forums, do an Manual Update and make sure you have virus definition version 7.30848. That is what I am using now.

[Streak]

Interesting.....I'm using 64 bit too.

Guess I'll have to go the manual update route when I get some extra time.

Thanks.

[Snacko]

Maybe you were lucky and missed it? If your computer was shut off for a while, you may have missed the bad virus definition. Because they put it up there and then chanted it a few hours later.

[Streak]

I hope I've missed it too.

And I hope it's not to much of a problem for you to get up & running again.

[Snacko]

Nope, I am up and running. I keep my system pretty well imaged, backedup, and data on separate drive from the system.