Wrongly Accused Of Being A Trojan

from the whoops dept

Following all those stories about people being wrongly accused of being spammers and put on blacklists, here's a story of McAfee wrongly accusing an ISP setup program as being a trojan. Because of this, anyone using McAfee and ISPWizard found themselves unable to connect to their ISP lately. Even worse, McAfee has been incredibly slow to respond to the issue, though, following the initial news report, they promised to release an update today, a week after the problem first surfaced. McAfee says the reason it happened was that the connection software was very similar to known trojans. As the battle against zombie machines continues, it's likely that more legitimate programs are going to get blocked. It wouldn't be surprising if trojan developers even try to make their programs look increasingly similar to legitimate programs for exactly this reason. All this is really doing is setting up an ongoing escalation battle. At some point, people are going to realize that simply matching application signatures isn't the best way to prevent malicious files. While it's been talked about, it would be nice to see more hybrid approaches that go closer to the root of the problem, rather than the reactive solutions that are popular today.

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