Original URL: http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/03/01/symantec_yahoo_false_alarm/
Yahoo! false! alert! drama!
Symantec snafu now sorted
Posted in Software & Security, 1st March 2007 11:08 GMT
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Faulty signature updates on Wednesday resulted in Symantec's anti-virus packages falsely identifying that Yahoo! mail was contaminated by malware.
The webmail service, currently in beta, was wrongly labelled as being contaminated by the Feebs worm [1] as a result of the snafu [2].
Symantec published a signature update later on Wednesday that resolved the problem.
Updates to security software signatures can occasionally result in false alarms against legitimate applications, a problem far from confined to Symantec. For example, in November Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare warned that Gmail was infected by malware.
And in February 2006, an update to Microsoft anti-spyware incorrectly labelled two versions of Symantec's anti-virus software as Trojan horse malware. ®