All AV vendors have problems. Just Google "(vendor) false positive" or "(vendor) update problem". It's just reality. When you have to build up to 20 new versions of your product daily, things go wrong.
The problems with AV updates industry-wide started with the massive increase in malware about 5 years ago. Before that, FPs and update issues were a relatively rare event. But now all AV vendors are in a constant battle to keep up with the fire-hose of malware, and stuff goes wrong. The best that an AV vendor can do is to implement as many safety checks, redundancies, internal air-bags and testing that they can given the short amount of time to react to a new threat. The tough part is balancing quality against the need to protect the customer from threats. Our head of R&D, Mark Patton, confesses to having nightmares about this stuff and obsesses over what we can do. We have implemented kill switches in the definition process (which we actually used this morning after we figured out what the problem was); we've implemented airbags that won't let VIPRE delete a Windows system file; we've implemented more rigorous code reviews and regression tests on new detections, and so on. We are also working on some interesting new technology, such as self-healing functionality inside of VIPRE that will self-heal a system in case a critical file is removed. Personally, I think the next frontier in the AV industry, now that vendors have mostly started figuring out how to deal with the volume of threats, is to figure out how to "never do harm". It's actually a lot harder than it might sound. Alex From: Jon Harris [mailto:jk.har...@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, May 07, 2010 3:32 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Computers becoming unresponsive accross entire network. PLEASE no!!! Not that the office is rolling out upgrades on Trend and I don't need another night of headaches. Jon On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 11:47 AM, David W. McSpadden <dav...@imcu.com<mailto:dav...@imcu.com>> wrote: Ok. That is two bad defs in two weeks? 1 Vipre 1 McAfee? Next is Trend? -----Original Message----- From: Luke [mailto:tesla...@gmail.com<mailto:tesla...@gmail.com>] Sent: Friday, May 07, 2010 11:45 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Computers becoming unresponsive accross entire network. Turned out to be a bad Deff. Bad def = 6274. ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
