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Avira Antivirus update cripples millions of Windows PCs

Antivirus firm Avira yesterday faced a problem that led several of its products to mistakenly block legitimate Windows applications during an Avira software update. Components reportedly blocked included iexplore.exe, notepad.exe and regedit.exe, plus applications including Microsoft Office and Google Updater were also sin- binned. Today, Avira updated the software to sidestep the problem.

"This issue has been resolved. Your Avira products should now be functioning normally," the German company said in a note on its Web site. "We deeply regret any difficulties this has caused you. Thank you for your patience and understanding."

"We contacted all of our users to let them know about our fix to the ProActiv situation this morning," Travis Witteveen, chief operating officer of Avira, said in a statement. "The issue only arose on 32-bit Windows premium, suite and professional products, whom had ProActiv turned on (by default ProActiv is an opt-in feature, so the infected base was not the entire base). We do not know the exact number of those impacted, but we are confident we reacted immediately and communicated thoroughly."

According to a report, Avira's fix simply disabled ProActiv. The company will investigate to uncover the root cause of the massive blocking before re-enabling the feature.

Read more -here-

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by anonymous - 2012.05.16 09:22

I Loled.... this awesome AV everyone rants about and look what happened.