Bad Avast Update Labels Many Files as Malware

On Thursday night, ALWIL Software, the creators of the Avast! antivirus program, released a bad update the misidentified many programs as malware.

High-profile applications such as RealTek sound drivers and certain versions of Skype were affected, according to ALWIL chief technical officer Ondrej Vilcek. The bad update was in the wild for five hours, he wrote in an email.

"At around 12:15am GMT we released VPS update 091203-0 which started flagging hundreds of innocent files as a "Win32:Delf-MZG" Trojan (or, in less common cases, as "Win32:Zbot-MKK")", the company added in a blog post. "Among the files affected were high-profile programs produced by Adobe, Realtek sound card drivers, various media players etc."  pcmag