This is a tough day for the users of the Webroot antivirus.
Malware signature update is issued by the company on this Monday which has triggered the software into mistakenly flagging the Windows system files as malware and thus melting down millions of the managed systems across the globe.
The problem has begun this afternoon on US east coast when the named antivirus product began to falsely mark those files as the tW32.Trojan.Gen, otherwise known as the generic malware. Which moved the crucial system files essential to the operating system’s functioning effectively to quarantine and thus making them unavailable to the Windows.
A thread on the above-mentioned company’s website is nine pages deep at the time of publishing, and news of this meltdown is evident on the Twitter.
From many independent tweets, it is confirmed that many major websites which include Facebook and Bloomberg are also marked as the phishing sites, thus preventing users from accessing those pages.
Security commentator SwiftOnSecurity has tweeted that the Webroot issue is only live for just 13 minutes, but the efforts of the company to remediate the problem are getting stalled due to the huge volume of clients requiring this fix.
The company claims to possess more than 30 million users, who have so far suggested fixes for the Home edition and then its Business edition software, but this company has yet to offer anything global or concrete for its entire affected user base at the time of writing this post.
A Webroot spokesperson confirmed the issue and that the company is “in the process of creating a fix,” but did not say when it would arrive.
It looks like it might end up being a long night for a lot of IT folk.