, The Register 2004-09-08
An Australian software developer has been left fuming after the latest virus definition update from McAfee caused his package to be wrongly identified as a Trojan horse programme.
McAfee's cock-up dates from 1 September when it released an antivirus DAT (signature file) update. It has yet to rectify its mistake.
ISPWizard Developer Mark Griffiths slammed McAfee's tardy response: "This is causing major problems for my business, the businesses of my customers [ISPs] and also their customers as well. Despite this problem being quickly reported to McAfee and it being stressed to them that this is a major problem which is causing damage to many businesses, they have been very slow to react," he said.
"Although they have now responded and admitted that this is a problem with their software, they have still not released a new update to their DAT files to fix the problem and say that it may take until Thursday [9 September] before it is actually released. In the meantime, the software continues to misidentify my software as being infected by a Trojan. End users that are being affected are either contacting the ISP for assistance and blaming them for distributing a Trojan - greatly increasing the support burden and costs for the ISP, or they are simply switching to another ISP," he added.
Other AV vendors (for example, Sophos) detect the BackDoor-AKZ Trojan without interfering with the operation of ISPWizard. "I'm not aware of any other anti-virus program that is misidentifying my software at the moment," said Griffiths.
So why is McAfee AV misdiagnosing a benign program as malignant? We don't know. Our repeated calls and emails to McAfee over the last two days failed to generate a response from the company
In copies of email correspondence between Griffiths and Avert Labs, McAfee's AV research division, a suggestion was made that the misdiagnosis could have arisen because components of ISPWizard were created with the same package as components of the backdoor Trojan program. But this remains only a theory. McAfee has offered Griffiths a temporary DAT file that end users would need to manually install on their systems as a workaround. Griffiths is unimpressed with the offer: he is frustrated that McAfee has not released an emergency automatic update. ®
