I got a mail from somone informing me that I was infected by MyDoom-A. That person received an infected mail from me. So I decided to check if Avast was working… Apparently it’s not updated since 9/9/2003 ! Current version of virus database was « ? 09/09/03 ». I had to manually update it, then it downloaded about 6-7Mb from the web and now it’s marked as « 0405-5 01/26/2004 ».
Any clue why it has been able to update by itself in the last few months ? « Automatically Updates » was on as Avast was always updating by itself… Until I found it wasn’t :(.
Yes I have a firewall but Avast is marked as « always trusted » and each time the firewall detects that an unknown application (updated Avast) try to access the internet, it simpyl askes me to allow it or not.
The manual update I did a few hours ago worked perfectly. But it updated the program and the virus database. I changed settings from « Automatic Updates On » to « Off ». This way I will be able to know if Avast updates its database or not.
Maybe it was a bug that has been corrected since 9/9/2003 ?
I remember this problem was discussed quite heavily on this forum (back in September). So it’s probably worth stepping by now and then to see if there’s no known problem…
Anyway, newer versions have the ability to actually inform you that the auto-update doesn’t work… Actually we’re quite confident that the auto-update feature is now pretty mature and works almost perfectly…
