Sophos anti-virus software for Mac OS X mistakes real files for pests
From the article
Anti-virus vendor Sophos has released an update of the Inqtana-B
virus identity file for it Sophos Anti-Virus for OS X software due to
false positives,” Tom Sanders reports for vnunet.com. “The company
initially released an antidote that incorrectly flagged various files
in Microsoft Office 2004 and in Adobe Acrobat Reader as being infected
with the OS X worm. Users in some cases reported that the anti-virus
software claimed over 1,000 infections… the anti-virus program will
block access or delete all ‘infected’ files, depending on the
software’s configurations. This effectively renders the systems useless.
Sanders reports,
The Sophos incident has given fuel to critics who
all along have claimed that the noise around the detection of the
first Mac OS X viruses last week was orchestrated by security vendors
who are seeking to grow their revenues. ‘First they ‘find’ a virus,
then they start a FUD[fear, uncertainty and doubt] factory of
misinformation, and finally they turn loose the REAL virus (called
their anti-virus software) on the newly paranoid Mac users they
stirred up,’ a user wrote on the Macfixit Apple enthusiasts’ website.
