“well everyone following security has heard/anticipated that avast was gonna get hit hard due to their popularity, guess it’s time.”
Who is “everyone”? Very few who have a real idea about the subject at hand would suggest such a thing.
The company knows the user base numbers and adjusts staffing and support levels. You don’t think they know IP’s and traffic numbers for definition downloads? I would think they can tell you active monthly user levels within 10k or so.
“The backlash from this will be superlative-word-of-your-choice, I’ll try catastrophic. Mom & Dad are just gonna vault everything that comes up suddenly virus, pity them their next reboot, no spybot/teatimer, THAT is for certain.”
This sort of situation is not unusual and talking it up is silly. Yes, it’s not good but it also happens quite often with most products and at some stage you can bet all of them have the same issues. Try dealing with some of the other companies on a commercial level…
“Bitdefender has a nice special price that I was already debating since avast missed malware and led me to bleeping computer to fix it (bitdefender on-line scan is the final check). Sorry, I wanna be faithful and all, but if my kids had destroyed all of our computers following avast’s recommended action I’d be in deep drek.”
Expecting an AV program to pick up most or all Malware shows a total lack of knowledge. You need a three tier protection method and all of them will over lap (FW, AV, malware). What would your kids be doing unsupervised on the pc and why would they not simply call you and ask about the problem? Why would you be in “drek”? No backup plans in place?
“I’m thinking corporate espionage or a bigger problem than we are all aware of yet - there is just no simple explanation of an error of this magnitude.”
I’m thinking that it’s often better to learn more about a subject than post It’s a mistake, most of the companies have had them on a similar level in one form or another. I deal with many AV companies to resolve issues like this, often. It’s not that usual to have it on this scale BUT it DOES happen.
No real idea why this is such a big problem for most of you. It was reasonably clear there was a problem, pause or stop the program, google and check with something else. We find in this case there is a issue so we simply wait some hours for a fixed update. We can still work and play, your system should still have two tiers of protection left and at most you don’t take risks while online.
“regardless, it is a truly sad day at our house”
Send me your address and I will post a big box of tissues for you.
We do need to be clear, this should NOT have happpened but this is far from the worst supported or most likely programs to have issues like this. It should be fixed within a few hours and is not likely to happen again for some time.