BitDefender – Defends A Little Too Well……

On Saturday, March 22, 2010 the company BitDefender had some major problems with its BitDefender 2009 and 2010 products for x64 platforms.  It seems the latest definition updates caused both Windows files (.dll, .exe) as well as their own to be detected as files infected with the Trojan.FakeAlert.5 virus and moved to Quarantine.  This faulty detection affected some systems so bad that they were unable to boot and users were forced to use the Last Known Good utility in Windows that has turned out over the years to be one of the best features Microsoft has ever come up with.

The company’s website does not state an approximation on how many systems were affected, but I’m sure they definitely looked on the bright side of things as it affected only one platform and not both x386 and x64.

Read BitDefenders’ Press Note here regarding the faulty definitions update.

It is very strange to me that on their website, in the Press Center area, they have a blurb regarding an award they received recently on the main page.  Only after clicking on More News, do you see the more important and timely news…  I feel this would be the perfect case of ‘full disclosure’ if there ever was one.

In today’s day and age of virtual technologies (easily created and managed test and Dev environments), testing tools (load, regression), version control (SourceForge, Team Foundation Server) and testing methodologies, situations such as these should not happen anymore; period.  I expect some heads to roll on this one.

I would like to keep an eye on how this will affects the company going forward as I have never heard of them until I read about this issue over the weekend, but it seems to be a private company created in 2001 which also received some financial assistance in the end of 2007 from an investment group made up of both U.S. and Romanian individuals.  And, if the way they handled this news is any indication, I would be very hard pressed to find any open and readily available divulgence of negative information anywhere, especially their website….