Botched Security Update Cripples Thousands of Computers 274
girlmad writes "Thousands of PCs have been crippled by a faulty update from security vendor Malwarebytes that marked legitimate system files as malware code. The update definition meant Malwarebytes' software treated essential Windows.dll and .exe files as malware, stopping them running and thus knocking IT systems and PCs offline, leaving lots of unhappy users and one firm with 80% of its servers offline."
Re:Production (Score:5, Informative)
AV software (or rather its definition files) has to be updated very fast if it is to have any value at all. You cannot qualify it for production, that takes too long. This is one reason the whole concept is fundamentally flawed, because it is still too slow.
Re:Microsoft Security Essentials... (Score:5, Informative)
MSE is highly praised by Slashdotters.
Only by those who don't pay attention to current reviews. Like many recent Microsoft products, MSE started off well, but has been in steady decline since its release.
Re:Microsoft Security Essentials... (Score:5, Informative)
Meh, who wants to keep checking the anti-virus reviews all the time and constantly switching, tossing money out here and there? These programs have the ability to cause enough problems on their own, and their effectiveness at "catching" things changes with the weather. You're better off just picking one and sticking with it, avoiding all the extra headaches. In the end, they're all pretty questionable (I wouldn't trust any of them over good old common sense), so you might as well get the one developed by the same people who make the OS to prevent any stupid little problems like what TFA is about. It just happens to be a nice bonus that Microsoft's product is free (well, beyond the Windows license fee at least...). IMO most of the "anti-virus industry" is just a bunch of whiny crooks themselves, and neither they or their software can really be trusted much more than the malware they claim to be fighting.
Re:scoring 71% percent vs. the industry average 92 (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is the solutions that may do a bit better catching the 0-day malware are also the ones that are so heavyweight they noticeably affect the performance of your system. There is a tradeoff at some point between resource usage and coverage. One thing MSE definitely has going for it is it doesn't badly degrade performance like McAfee, Norton, recent AVG, etc do.
Re:Microsoft Security Essentials... (Score:4, Informative)
Of course you can not produce unbiased reviews that actually say this...
Actually, the leading security software reviewer site, AV-Test, gave MSE a bad review in the last round, they did not pass "AV-Test certification".
Re:Microsoft Security Essentials... (Score:2, Informative)
NO, it hasn't been getting bad reviews, it has had some negative press based on some dodgy tests that try to use essentials for something it isn't really meant for. They throw zero day malware to test its heuristics, which are not wonderful. however in known malware (the stuff 99.9% of people need protection against) it is exceptionally good.
This is considered the leading AV review site in the world, not achieving their "certification" (the icon in the third column) in test is certainly a bad review, most well known security software manage to exceed that threshold. MSE didn't in the last two tests.
http://www.av-test.org/en/tests/test-reports/ [av-test.org]
Re:Microsoft Security Essentials... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Microsoft Security Essentials... (Score:2, Informative)
AV-Test is bullshit shill-paid, like almost every site out there.
MSE here, have run it since XP. Not one damned problem.
Re:Microsoft Security Essentials... (Score:2, Informative)
Right, and it's what I use and recommend.
Which begs the question: why do I have to install it? Why doesn't it ship with?
Anti-trust laws.
PS: It doesn't beg anything, it raises a question.
Re:Really, so explain this: (Score:5, Informative)
From the "article"
Disclosure
Symantec Corporation funded the production of this report, selected the test metrics and list of products to
include in this report, and supplied some of the test scripts used for the tests.
Hmm...