Updating niggles

Troublesome month for security vendors

Last month proved to be troublesome for security vendors Sophos, Microsoft and Kaspersky, as niggles with updates caused problems for their customers.

Sophos customers suffered an onslaught of false positives thanks to a fault in the update file which was released to add detection of the OSX-Inqtana-B worm for Mac OS X. The fault resulted in Sophos Anti-Virus generating false alerts on a number of files in Microsoft Office 2004 and Adobe Acrobat Reader. A revised update was released shortly after developers spotted the problem, alongside an apology to customers.

Meanwhile, many of the users of Microsoft's Antigen email security product were left without fully functional email systems for several hours after they received a faulty update to the Kaspersky scanning engine. The Antigen product - which Microsoft inherited when it acquired email security firm Sybari last year - uses a number of different scanning engines including Kaspersky's to provide anti-virus protection. A Microsoft spokesperson explained: 'As soon as we were aware that our customers were experiencing email problems due to the Kaspersky update, we escalated through the appropriate channels across Kaspersky and Microsoft and were able to define, test and provide a resolution.'

Indeed, Microsoft did not have an easy month at all with its security products - just days before the problems with Antigen, an update to Windows AntiSpyware beta 1 caused it to misidentify Symantec security tools as password-stealing malicious software. On detection of certain registry keys set by the Symantec products, Windows AntiSpyware generated an alert and prompted the user to delete the keys. Users who went ahead and deleted the keys would have found that Symantec AntiVirus and Symantec Client Security software stopped functioning correctly.

Fortunately for the two companies, only a small number of customers are thought to have been affected by this error, due to the fact that the misidentification applied only to Symantec's enterprise products.

01 March 2006

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