Kaspersky Update Quarantines Windows Explorer

[Jimmy 2004]

We all know that Windows Explorer can be a bit of a nuisance from time to time, but classifying it as malware is a little extreme. However, that’s just what an update for Kaspersky Lab’s antivirus did earlier this week, resulting in explorer.exe being quarantined or, in extreme cases, deleted. The update, which was released at around 7:00pm on Wednesday, was only active for about two hours before Kaspersky became aware of the issue and withdrew it to limit the damaged it caused. David Emm, a senior technology consultant at Kaspersky, gave the following statement:

This is classic false-alarm territory. We will check through our systems and see if we can tighten them up so we don't run into this problem in the future. No antivirus company, including ourselves, can say they have never had a false alarm [but], on all fronts, we do what we can to minimise any potential risk for our customers.

Fortunately only one corporate customer and a handful of home users have reported being affected by this problem.

Source: ZDNet.com

[smartali89]

I am affected to,, thats why I keep getting errors about explorer.exe, I will update as soon as possible, thanks for this info

[newtekie1]

Good thing I ditched that crap years ago. I never liked Kaspersky, too many false alarms, system hangs, and huge amounts of system resources used.

Having false alarms is something that is in the nature of AV software, but alerting to explorer.exe is just ridiculous. Though I'm really not surprised it came from Kaspersky, they false alarmed on pretty much everything in the 2 years I used it.

[mab1376]

i was not affected at all kaspersky was off for a few days because of gaming, and i just forgot to turn it back on.

[hacker111]

If only a handful of people were affected by this problem and there were no major issues..I would just forget it and move on..instead of wasting time

[Darkrealms]

He could have always come back with a whity responce like "We apoligize our software was doing its job. We will ask Microsoft to do theirs." : )

[OnBoard]

Originally Posted by newtekie1

Good thing I ditched that crap years ago. I never liked Kaspersky, too many false alarms, system hangs, and huge amounts of system resources used.

Having false alarms is something that is in the nature of AV software, but alerting to explorer.exe is just ridiculous. Though I'm really not surprised it came from Kaspersky, they false alarmed on pretty much everything in the 2 years I used it.

You must had that "potentially dangerous software" tick on. Been using for a year now and not a single false alarm, no hangs ever and uses "massive" 1.5megs of memory

Didn't notice anything about this, but I boot so seldom that some updates aren't installed immidiately.

[Mussels]

Originally Posted by OnBoard

You must had that "potentially dangerous software" tick on. Been using for a year now and not a single false alarm, no hangs ever and uses "massive" 1.5megs of memory

Didn't notice anything about this, but I boot so seldom that some updates aren't installed immidiately.

^ what he said. i ticked that damn thing on the first install and it was a freaking huge pain in the ass. with that OFF, the program is great, i never get alerts/popups.... and never any false alarms either. (i use KIS, the version with popup blockers + firewall included)

[Wile E]

Originally Posted by Mussels

^ what he said. i ticked that damn thing on the first install and it was a freaking huge pain in the ass. with that OFF, the program is great, i never get alerts/popups.... and never any false alarms either. (i use KIS, the version with popup blockers + firewall included)

I agree. And KIS 6 & 7 loads to about 40MB total. Hardly a resource hog.