Symantec false alert floors Macs
A false positive in Norton AntiVirus (NAV) for Macintosh left many Apple fans fearful that their machines had become infected with a Trojan last week. The glitch - triggered by a rogue virus definition update - left Mac users running various versions of NAV for Mac under the false impression that their swap files were infected with malware called “Hacktool.Underhand”. The bogus warnings were frequently accompanied by system crashes on machines running Mac OS X.
Symantec quickly released updated definition files to resolve the problem but not before the SNAFU severally inconvenienced a significant number of Mac fans, who have vented their frustration on online discussion forums or by mailing El Reg. “I personally had to rebuild my machine as a result of instruction from Symantec staff,” Mac user James Hackett from South Australia writes. “I’m not happy about losing three days work and having to do a full rebuild but am somewhat amused by the irony. As a long-term Mac user and previous net admin, who can’t remember seeing a malicious Apple virus/Trojan ever it seems only right that I should be exposed to this trauma as a result of poorly written [anti-]Virus software.”