ESET’s home and business customers took to the company’s forums earlier today to complain that they had been prevented from accessing a large number of websites after applying the latest product updates.
Users reported not being able to access websites such as eBay, Amazon, MSN, Google, news websites from various countries, personal sites, and even ESET’s own support pages because their security product had detected JS/ScrInject.B and HTML/Refresh.BC Trojan infections.
Some complained that the buggy update prevented hundreds and even thousands of their endpoints from accessing important websites.
An investigation revealed that the malware detections were false positives caused by the virus signature database update version 13102. ESET initially advised both home and business users to roll back the virus signature database updates in their products. The security firm released update 13103 roughly five hours ago to properly address the problem.
The earlier issue is now fixed. Virus signature update V13103 is the latest version and no longer flags false positives. Update ASAP
— ESET (@ESETUK) February 29, 2016
Users who are unable to immediately apply the update have been advised to create temporary exceptions for the websites they want to visit. The exceptions should be removed after the update is installed.
“We would like to assure you than the problem pertained only to web browsing and no files on disks were affected. We apologize for the inconvenience,” ESET told customers.
It’s not unheard of for security product updates to cause problems for users. Last year, Symantec released a Norton update that caused the Internet Explorer web browser to crash. Shortly after, Panda Security issued an update that resulted in system, application and even files associated with Panda products being detected as malware.
Related: Microsoft Reissues Security Update Due to Outlook Crash
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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