Last evening the kids came to me to let me know their computer was complaining of a Trojan Horse virus. I didn’t have time to deal with it, so I told them to click Delete and let me know if anything else went wrong.
Late last night, the computer was freed up, so I make sure Avast was updated and started a full scan of the hard drive. Surprisingly, every once in awhile it popped up to identify another file infected with a Trojan Horse. At first I didn’t think that much of it; after all, my kids like to download all the 1-hour demo games and it’s not uncommon to have to do some cleanup work every so often to strip off some CoolWebSearch toolbar.
But, as the scan went on, it started getting into programs that concerned me. These were programs that have been installed on the computer for ages. I decided to take a closer look, and the files that were supposedly infected hadn’t had their timestamps altered. Suspicious now, I did a quick Google on the virus name. The first entry had me cursing. Apparently Avast had a problem and they were mistakenly identifying files as infected.
As I understand it from various postings today, the situation didn’t last long. Avast fixed the problem and the new update was released. But, that doesn’t solve MY problem, which is that I was wrongly deleting and/or quarantining files that were NOT infected. I didn’t have time to deal with it last night, but I have a bad feeling I’ve got legitimate apps that will not run now because some of their important files are gone.
At least we’re leading up to a weekend when I’ll have time to spend on it. It could probably use a refresh of XP to clean all the kids’ garbage off of it. I’ve been pretty happy with Avast, and would have probably kept using it, but this will also give me an excuse to try another AV. I’m thinking about trying one I hadn’t heard of before, called Avira. Maybe I’ll do a review after awhile to let you know how it goes.
[...] Avast gone mad? [...]