Users of Panda antivirus products have been fighting a false positive all day today. The antivirus reportedly detects Windows Updates, Microsoft Office, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and other common software titles as “suspicious items” and moves .exe and .dll files to quarantine. This can break applications or in worst cases even cause computers to not boot properly. Some are reporting that affected computers are not even able to come back up in Safe Mode.
Affected products:
- Panda Cloud Office Protection
- Panda Cloud Office Protection Advanced
- Panda Antivirus Pro 2015
- Panda Internet Security 2015
- Panda Global Protection 2015
- Panda Gold Protection
Panda released updated definitions this morning, so updated clients should no longer be affected and if files can be restored from quarantine, that may solve the problem. Rebooting computers was not being recommended as the computers may not come back up.
We inform you that we have had a problem with our signature file that might have affected our PCOP and Retail 2015 customers. This issue causes some files to be moved to the quarantine.
The signature file has already been replaced, so this situation should not recur. Nonetheless, we advise our customers not to restart your computer. At Panda Security we are analyzing the impact and working to restore the situation at the endpoint.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We will keep you informed at all times.
Panda has been busy fielding questions over Twitter and also provided information through their media center website. Those computers that are able to receive automatic updates should be receiving an automatically deployed solution.
The solution which restores the quarantined files has been automatically deployed in all the affected products. We are working on a tool to be installed on those computers which require a manual installation of the solution. We will update the information as soon as it is ready.
The Panda Support article related to today’s issue provides solutions for different scenarios including stopping the Panda services and running a Panda Security recovery executable manually.