ust in time for this week's big RSA computer-security conference comes word, from the Washington Post's Brian Krebs, that a preliminary version of Microsoft's Windows AntiSpyware program was flagging a Symantec anti-virus program as spyware and prompting users to delete it. Krebs cites the postings in an online forum and writes: "[J]udging from the growing number of other threads on this in that forum, this is shaping up to be a pretty big issue for companies that have deployed Microsoft's free anti-spyware product inside their networks."

That sparked a big thread on Slashdot. Some of the people there took the opportunity to lodge criticisms against the Symantec program, as my colleague Brian Chin notes.

Still, that kind of attention is probably not the way Microsoft wanted to kick off its big push into the security-software market. The company acknowledges the error and has released an update to fix the problem, which it says isn't evident in the latest beta version of the program, now known as Windows Defender. Microsoft is describing the number of customers affected as "very limited." Read on for the company's full response:

Microsoft and Symantec are both aware of an issue currently affecting customers using both Microsoft Windows AntiSpyware Beta 1 and versions of Symantec AntiVirus (SAV) Corporate Edition and Symantec Client Security (SCS). The issue involves a Windows AntiSpyware Beta 1 signature (5805) released at 11:30pm on Thursday, February 9th which incorrectly identified a registry key affecting these Symantec products as belonging to a password stealing malware known as PWS.Bancos.A.

Customers running Symantec's consumer products, Norton Antivirus and Norton Internet Security, are not impacted by this issue. This issue also does not affect customers using Symantec's software alongside Microsoft Windows Defender Beta 2 either in Windows XP or preview versions of Windows Vista.

Customers running Symantec Antivirus (SAV) Corporate Edition versions 7, 8, 9 or 10 or Symantec Client Security (SCS) versions 1, 2 or 3 in combination with Windows AntiSpyware Beta 1 could be impacted by this issue. The beta software will prompt and allow the user to remove a registry key containing subkeys belonging to these Symantec products. The deletion of these registry keys will cause all versions of the SAV and SCS software to stop operating correctly. No files are removed in this situation, only registry keys.

Once this issue was discovered, Microsoft quickly released a new signature set (5807) to remove this false positive. Both companies are working jointly together to identify the number of affected customers, which we believe to be very limited.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/m...ves/101523.asp



Just how would i become a news poster.... I think i could do good job.

Good point. I dont know how they are appointed though. I dont like begging. And like it less when its gona piss someone off.