Early this morning I turned on the computer to check my email, facebook, and watch a few videos before I headed off to class on campus. 2 hours later I get back home from class and get on the computer. Pulled up firefox again to check so more stuff and I am bombarded by 6 virus warnings from youtube, facebook, and pretty much every other safe website I have visited many times over in the past. I tried coming to the forums here but it wouldn’t let me connect until now a few hours since the problem occured. I mean just about everywhere I went I would get a virus alert from facebook, youtube, or whatever site I tried to connect to including avast’s site. I scanned my computer and it found 296 infect files. I just came back online again after the scan and everything seems fine and I am not getting anymore warnings. So was this some sort of problem on avasts end that they just fixed or am I in trouble.
Yup after going through the other forum posts and doing another full system scan that turned up 0 infected files I am pretty sure that this was the result of the Massive Avast! Update Scare or MAUS for short (yeah I am naming it). I am a ok now ;D.
We are supposed to RESTORE from chest? I have deleted many but they continued to be duplicated in the chest again and again, so it doesn’t matter.
I have bout 100 files in there and I do not have time to play this "restore party’ with Avast.
This whole mess is inexcusable. I am a busy person and I expect my AV (that is paid for) to work quietly in the background, not disrupt my computer for the better part of a day!
So do I have to restore these things in the chest? Many are JS files ( a launch of a script) And I AM NOT CHECKING each individual restore each time. Like I said, over 100 in there. many are duplicates
If it reads that the file or .exe is still in there, why restore and overwrite?
I wish someone would post some clear info on this please. thank you!
Just rescan the files within Chest (right click them) and restore all the clean ones.
I have well over 8000 files from today in that chest. Any suggestions on how to do that before I become old andsenile??? Doing those one at a time will take forever (there may be even more than 8k files) ;D
As far as I’m aware you can select more than one file, see image example of some file samples I have in the chest and select Restore. Select the first file scroll to the last and Press the Shift key and hold, then click the last file.
However with 8000 I don’t know if you can just highlight the first and do the old Ctrl+A (select all) trick to select all. Obviously you have to ensure that you don’t restore any files that were in the chest before today. Or ones that weren’t for this -inf detection.
You can order the files in the chest by clicking on the relevant column heading, either the Transfer tine or Virus column, this should make sure that only the correct files would be restored.
One other consideration is, why bother restoring any files back to the temp internet files folder, as temp files that would be absolutely pointless, only files outside of this location should be considered for restoration. So you could order the files in the chest by clicking on the Original location and even delete all those from the temp internet files location directly from the chest.
That should greatly reduce the numbers you are talking about.
Why do you all think we have endless time to play with avast? SOmething we paid for to do a job so that we could do what we need to do with our computers?
An AV is supposed to shut up and run in the background to keep us safe… not CAUSE A MAJOR DISRUPTION and USAGE of time in a day!
Why should i run a scan on everything in the virus chest? Are you nuts? You can come here and do it for me please… I have other things to do.
Why would you run a scan in the chest - well to ensure that you don’t restore any any other virus detections in there that are legit and not related to this FP. If you know you didn’t have any others in there before this then no need. You can restore those ones, using the methods I suggested to save time in not having to do it a file at a time.
How many file do you have in the chest ?
I kind of think it’s funny that people are getting all riled up about avast porking their system when I just had about 30 systems go “belly up” during a Windows 7 Service Pack 1 installation. I guess all software should never have faults huh?
That will surely be the day.
I understand your angriness.
I don’t understand your blindness.
I agree with your statement, however I’m a bit upset that Avast didn’t have more information go out on this, I found it through their blog, which to my knowledge is still the only place they have posted anything, I’d think a large reference on there home page would have been appropriate, but as you might imagine they didn’t want the word to get out they had made a major mistake, that would drive off new customers but they guy like me who runs ADMN and protects 50+ pc’s and shutdowns down my network in order to contain and isolate the problem, well sorry for the hours of time it wasted, I hesitate to think how many others out there still dont know what happened and have concerns about the soundness of there network.
I saw another post you made indicating you knew right off this was a FP and people dont read, and yes to a certain extent that has some truth, that was my 1st thought as well but I also had several PC’s that it did move to chest, and when you have your entire company calling you with countless warnings, yes it does send you into a bit of panic mode.
I got the same thing bro. I had 6 emails and 3 phone calls in less than 30 minutes. Avast works pretty well in stopping things before/as they get on a computer, so you can be pretty confident that it wasn’t a virus that got onto one system and started spreading 50 billion others.
I understand that you’re a bit perturbed that you couldn’t find any information about it except for the blog, but as in my Windows 7 SP1 example, I found little information on that as well.
Fortunately, Avast was able to fix their mistake in 45 minutes, whereas Microsoft still has yet to figure out exactly why their service pack crippled countless windows 7 and server 2008 systems, as well as why it removed all previous system restore points, giving the customers little chance of repairing their systems without some technical knowledge.
They eventually put out a kb article after one of the in-house devs reported the problem and a possible fix on one of the MS tech blogs, but it’s not like they emailed everyone that has a windows 7 / 2008 system and warned them when they first found out about it…
Avast simply can’t send out 130+ million emails to warn their users.
I can definitely see a need to have a warning on their website and hope they do so in the future.
Anyway, let’s just say avast did own up to their mistake (the blog post), and agree that Avast should make some changes in the future (hopefully it doesn’t happen again though) like posting important information on their home page and a warning in the forum. They did have a problem with a false-positive last year that was much more devastating, and they had a big warning right on top of the forum.
I would have liked to see that again this time.
Well, Avast, you live and learn. If you’re aware of a mistake that could cause a bunch of problems, try to get the information out as quickly as you can, and to as many outlets as you can. If we know about the problem, we can use that info to help others before they royally screw something up and start throwing blames at you for doing so…
8)
Were certainly all prone to mistakes, I know I certainly have made my fair share in my position as IT Manager, we live and learn as you stated. I’ll find positives from this experience, all be it was no fun at all there are lessons to be learned, I certainly have. I believe experience is the best teacher and I’ll take those lessons and move on from here.
Sounds good. Now at least you know the few basic places to check when a “strange outbreak” appears on your network.
Also, tell your users to READ!!! the messages on their screens. If it says “Don’t worry, Avast Protected you!”, then don’t have them do a system scan.
Again though, hopefully we don’t see another FP like this for a long time, if ever!
Cheers!