back to article Borked ESET antivirus update says entire web is too risky to browse

Surfers who rely on ESET anti-virus are having a hard time surfing the web following a misfiring anti-virus update, pushed out on Monday morning. The update is stopping people who apply it from browsing most of the internet, including ESET’s own site. Sites such as Amazon, MSN and more are falsely being labelled as …

  1. Real Ale is Best
    Black Helicopters

    It's probably correct!

  2. Conrad Longmore

    Exactly. The internet is dangerous. Best to block it and get the stuff you need off those 3.5" cover disks on the front of magazines.

    1. Allan George Dyer

      Nah - those disks can be infected too.

    2. asdf

      joke aside

      >Best to block it and get the stuff you need off those 3.5" cover disks on the front of magazines.

      Or you know you can browse using a Tails OS iso as read only storage in a VM. That way not only does nothing persist between VM reboots (including said malware or other junk advertisers track you with, also exploiting out of VMs is relatively rare (compared to say flash flaws or whatever) and 0 days largely beyond the skiddies) but you also get the advantage of turn key tor browsing so your ISP and their advertising buddies can go fug off as well. With unity mode its relatively seamless with your regular desktop. The drawbacks of course are having to use FF derivatives (I don't mind) and having to download a new 1 gig iso every few weeks (again not a biggie for me).

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Happy

        Re: joke aside

        I don't even bother with ROM storage. Copy in Tails from golden master retrieval and dispose the copy afterward. I use the same procedure with my certificate authority virtual machine as well. KISS.

  3. Knewbie

    FW rules

    I remember that "a friend of mine" tried to configure his own linux firewall back in the days.

    His source was a pretty well made How-to on the net, but because he was a bit of a freak he decided to commit and test every line in the FW as he got going. Good practices, and all that stuff.

    and of course, the first line in a FW rule is DENY ALL ^^

  4. Paul Woodhouse

    didn't cause major upsets, brought up a trojan warning about the MSN homepage, blocked access to a proboards page I tried going on, brought up trojan warnings about a few other pages, IIRC, codeproject was one, thereg wasn't...

    was fixed the next time ESET updated...

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Been causing me headaches all data ...

    ... in my role as IT Manager, been getting people complaining all today. Thank <deity> that the update has come through and the dust is finally settling - now I can start to get some work done!

  6. kventin

    """Slovenia-based firm"""

    Slovakia-based firm

    FTFY

    i know eastern marches of the continent could sometimes be a tad bit confusing. the names are similar, flags all alike... here's a clue: Slovakia is the one in the Group B in Euro 2016, along with Russia and, yes, England and Wales. Slovenia is not. HTH

  7. Howard Hanek
    Paris Hilton

    Thank Goodness

    I thought ESET had been acquired by a consortium of Nigerian scammers......

  8. Paul Woodhouse

    aren't they Malta based?

  9. reeferman

    PRACE BETS NAOW!

    Considering the disruption this has caused to us (one company, 200 users) I expect that ESET will have a great many unhappy customers today. Anyone prepared to bet on if/when a more placatory response comes from ESET? I place 100 quatloos on the date when our licenses are up for renewal.

  10. dajames

    Err on the side of caution

    Much better to have false positives than false negatives, in these things.

    However, this was probably simply a random cock-up, and it's just good fortune that it failed safe rather than the other way.

    1. TxRx
      FAIL

      Re: Err on the side of caution

      Good in that one single respect when you look closer and see there was no actual threat.

      Sucks in the other respect that every machine within your company mimics a full on infection/hack as the updates to each machine roll out this lovely false positive.

      Credit to ESET that they announced and released the fix before companies started tearing down to be safe.

  11. Mark Allen

    Glad my clients don't get to work too early

    So what time did the fix roll out? I have Eset with many many clients... but didn't hear any problems. Maybe my clients get to work late. Or maybe when they get to work they do weird things like work instead of accessing the net.

    Was this both the Home and Business editions? Or only one of those? Just a puzzle as to how I missed all of this fun...

    1. Adam JC

      Re: Glad my clients don't get to work too early

      Do you run ESET remote administrator? If so, they may not have updated in time from the mirror.

      The update was released at 12:42(ish) and was fixed less than an hour later on all the sites I manage set to 'auto-update' from the internet. A lot of the setups using a local LAN mirror for updates didn't experience the problem.

      Massive props to ESET for announcing immediately what it was and also for fixing it quickety quick. No harm done except some concerned calls to the helpdesk.

  12. ecofeco Silver badge

    ESET?

    Damn how the mighty have fallen.

  13. This post has been deleted by its author

  14. MDL1983

    ESET Hell

    I was alerted to this by a couple of users, out of about 60 that utilise ESET.

    I didn't make anyone else aware for 2 reasons:

    Firstly, I didn't want to make people take a blasé approach to viruses being detected on their computers.

    Secondly to gauge the reaction, ie; who will be responsible and say that they're getting warnings of virus detections on their PC's. Only 1 other person contacted me that day...

    I found a post on the ESET forum that changing the update mode to allow 'Pre-Release Updates' resolved the issue after a 75MB-ish download.

    None of the sites affected utilise the Management Console, so it wasn't limited in that respect.

  15. TeeCee Gold badge
    Meh

    Actually, rather than teh hole internets as the headline would suggest, it would appear from the article that only sites using javascript were said to be nasty.

    This is incorrect how exactly.......?

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