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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