BEWARE AVAST FALSE POSITIVE VBS-MALWARE-GEN?

[jko]

Did routine scan with Malwarebytes and AVAST Smart Scan today - both OK and clear

 

Decided to do a full scan with AVAST as a precaution. It came up with a multiple infection with VBS Malware-Gen. It was not not able to delete/move to chest all the infected items. It recommended a full boot scan - which I did.

 

This boot scan produced and deleted HUNDREDS (probably a few thousand) of 'infected' files, with the scan going so fast I could hardly watch it. It ran for nearly 15 minutes then it froze. I switched power off and rebooted to get the Windows 10 repair blue screen and access to System Restore - which, thank God, worked!

 

See attached jpegs for the original Avast advice plus a screen shot of one page (of hundreds) of the boot scan

 

This topic is covered on https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=197572.0

 

Anybody else experienced this? Feedback appreciated.

 

 

[Chicog]

It seems that an Avast VPS update (VPS 170222) has removed these threat pop-ups, which further lead us to believe most issues explained by users are false positives. Given the breadth and sheer quantity of allegedly infected files, this makes sense – Avast has been detecting thousands of files on some “infected” systems, all the way down to software-level errata (like Gimp or Photoshop) and to system DLLs.

To fix this problem, update to Avast! VPS 170222 or simply ignore the detected threats that meet these same conditions.

 

http://www.gamersnexus.net/industry/2812-avast-detecting-vbs-malware-gen-threats#!/ccomment

It's not the first time these muppets have screwed up.

[KhunBENQ]

No need for another thread on this threat.

 

 

This one closed.