Defective update erased data on thousands of PCs

Defective Malwarebytes update erased data on thousands of PCs

The company Malwarebytes, which deals with products for protection against viruses, was in the center of the scandal. Another update to its products, which contained flaws, mistakenly took the usual system files for malicious code. As a result, destroyed data on thousands of client machines. The manufacturer has acknowledged the issue of the defective update and assured that its spread is stopped.

As written by representatives of Malwarebytes, because of flaws in the next list of virus signatures were affected thousands of computers around the world. After only eight minutes update has been removed from the servers of the company. Instantly thousands of people rushed to the assault support and forums to immediately correct the situation.


Due to defects in the description of virus signatures security programs Malwarebytes considered mandatory system files Windows (Library . DLL and executable EXE-files) viruses. After such a mistaken identity work of these system components was blocked, and the computers stopped working. In some organizations, this incident led to a full stop work.

According to the website The Inquirer, one of the organizations in the UK as a result of the update had lost 80% of their production servers. Many other organizations, which uses the platform of Windows and anti-virus solutions Malwarebytes, faced with the same level of damage. Of course, the company has promised to take all measures to prevent such does not happen again. In particular, we plan to introduce additional stages of quality control and mutual control between the developers updates.

The company Malwarebytes was not the first in the sad list of manufacturers whose small updates to software causes great damage. This is typical for anti-virus companies, which, in the struggle for a rapid response to new threats are constantly at risk to release a new update with the same defects. Even more dangerous, it can happen not only to the relatively small vendors, but these whales antivirus industry. According to experts from other anti-virus company TrendMicro, in today's race viral weapons from such a marriage is literally no one is immune.