The Crazy World of BranevMy personal E-space revealing what I think, what I drink and how I hate the pink

BitDefender Screwed Big Time

The supposedly peaceful weekend of the 12th week of 2010 turned to a hellish experience for many users of Bitdefender around the world. The famous once (more like notorious now) antivirus solution played a bad joke to all of its users, that had 64bit OS. In the late afternoon on 20th of March the AV started marking tons of files as infected by some virus called Trojan.FakeAlert.5. Among the targeted files were…all files  I personally am a user of the same AV protection system with 64bit Windows 7  installation and guess what – I also had the problem. In my case  I lost “only” svchost.exe, winlogon.exe, hundreds of .dll files from my System32 directory and so on. When I noticed this deadly fandango (luckily I was near the PC then) – I immediately stopped the real protection of the antivirus and even warned some friends of mine that use the same AV solution. Nevertheless, due to the many files already quarantined and unable to restore (missing processes etc) I had to revert to an earlier system point. After reboot I permanently stopped the AV RTP till an official solution is posted.

Meanwhile in the forum of Bidefender a mini-war was enacted. The enraged users (I totally understand the ones that ended up with a dead OS) started complaining and wanted “the head of the king” on a silver plate. A rain of subpoenas will pour over the office of BitDefender, as it seems. The support acted a bit inadequately – slow responses in the forum, sporadic answers in twitter and a late-posted press-release. Finally a temporary solution appeared – revert to an older engine version. Mark it down – the auto-update cannot help here so it has to be done with the weekly.exe file.

In the end, a patch that supposedly fixed the problem with the quarantined files was posted. Still it did not help in my case, as I have done a manual restore in some cases…and others were already restored by Windows itself. I hope that it helps for real with other people. If you want to give it a try, please visit http://ow.ly/1oZ52.

All in all – an unpleasant story that will damage the reputation of BitDefender and will cost them a lot. I personally own 5 licenses for 3 years (recently renewed my previous subscription) and I will continue using the product, as I hope that this will be the last time that such a horrific mistake ends up as a reality. Still, another blow like this may turn me away, too.