Tag: false positive
-
VirusTotal project aims to remediate false positives
Security vendors to receive alerts when legitimate files are detected as malicious. False positives are a huge problem for the IT industry in general and for security products in particular. Indeed, in our VB100 and VBSpam comparative tests, many otherwise well performing products have failed to achieve an award because they blocked too many legitimate…
-
IEEE announces Anti-Malware Support Service
‘Software taggant system’ and ‘clean file metadata exchange’ discussed at previous VB conferences. Wouldn’t it be nice if providers of software packers included a licence key in the packer, so that anti-malware solutions could distinguish legitimate from malign use – and, if needed, blacklist those keys used by malware authors? And wouldn’t it also be…
-
Sophos red flags Google Analytics
Popular analytics tool mistakenly flagged as ‘high risk’. Security firm Sophos had an embarrassing moment this morning when its scanner flagged Google Analytics as malicious. While the average Internet user may have little experience with Google ‘s analytics tool, it is used by half of the one million most popular websites – to track information…
-
Keylogger on Samsung laptops proves to be false alarm
AV product wrongly flags malware based on existence of directory. A number of security bloggers raised concern yesterday about the apparent presence of a keylogger on Samsung laptops – only to realise it was, in fact, a false positive. A Network World reporter discovered the ‘keylogger’ on two different makes of Samsung laptops. Reminded of…
-
McAfee offers payments to cover FP cleanup costs
Compensation for faulty update victims could set precedent. Victims of the erroneous McAfee DAT update last month are being offered cash payments to cover costs incurred in fixing the problem. The issue emerged on 21 April, when users of McAfee ‘s corporate solution VirusScan Enterprise found their machines rendered inoperable after the common process svchost…
-
False positive problem hits avast! users
Human failure blamed for faulty update. A relatively small subsection of the massive user base for Alwil ‘s ever-popular avast! products were hit by a string of false positives last week, which in some cases saw vital Windows components quarantined or deleted. An update released in the very early hours of Thursday morning (00:15 GMT)…
-
Serious false positive hits users of old McAfee engines
Batch of system files wrongly flagged as malware, current versions not affected. An update released by McAfee last week resulted in problems around the world, as some vital system files were flagged as malware by updated scanner products, bringing affected systems to a crashing halt. The issue is believed only to have affected users of…
-
VB announces latest VBSpam certification results
Two products achieve top level VBSpam Platinum award. Virus Bulletin has announced the results of its second comparative review of anti-spam products, revealing two top-level awards. Of the nine products tested, two achieved VBSpam Platinum certification awards, while one VBSpam Gold award and two silver-level awards were handed out. VB’s Anti-spam Test Director Martijn Grooten…
-
DKIM usage shows significant growth
US banks urged to use authentication method In a report on its website , Internet giant Cisco states it has been seeing almost 700,000 non-spam messages that contain valid DKIM signatures per week – a number that has almost tripled since a year ago. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is an authentication method where the sending…
-
McAfee false positive flags Vista component
Innocent file labelled trojan. McAfee has updated one of its detections after a faulty update led to an integral component of the Windows Vista operating system being falsely flagged as a trojan horse. The innocent file, the Windows console input method editor executable conime.exe , was alerted on as a password-stealing trojan for online gaming…