Avast problem today

[HunkyLuke]

Avast's auto update today is resulting in a whole mess of false warnings about malware, its all over twitter and several news sites are starting to report it too. Its making the web unusable.

the only temporary solution is to disable the web shield.

[HunkyLuke]

Looks like this is now solved, you just need to update your Avast:

Open the Avast User Interface and navigate to the Maintenance Tab, then to the Update section.
Click on the Update engine and virus definitions button.

Your "Current Version" should say "110411-2"

If it doesn't, update again. It may take a few tries (it took me 2 tries).

[Gin]

Yep, i had almost the same problem also today. Then after updating it was fixed.

[HunkyLuke]

Avast has put out an official apology for this cock-up:

Virus definition update 110411-1 contained an error that resulted in a good number of innocent sites being flagged as infected. Generally, all sites with a script in a specific format were affected.

Our virus lab staff discovered the problem quickly after releasing the bad update and immediately started working on a fix. The fix was released about 45 minutes after the problematic update and has version number 110411-2. Anyone who still has this problem is kindly asked to manually update the definitions to the latest version, e.g. by right-clicking the avast taskbar icon (the orange (a) ball), and selecting Update -> Engine and Virus Definitions.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. As this typically only affected remote sites (and not local files), simply updating to the latest definitions should completely solve the issue (no local files have been quarantined).

You can see this and comment on it at https://blog.avast.com/2011/04/11/false-positive-issue-with-virus-defs-110411-1/

[Vendzilla]

I always liked Avast