F-Secure for Mac places Apple system files in trash

According to Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure's chief research officer, the beta of F-Secure Mac Protection, "had a serious false alarm" on Monday evening.

Database update 2011-03-14_03, he said, caused several false alarms in clean files with detection names such as Exploit:W32/NeosploitPDF.gen!A and Exploit:JS/Brooks.gen!A.

"The problematic update was removed after two hours. Beta users who received the update have seen some of their clean files moved to trash", he noted in a security blog.

The problem, the CRO went on to say, only affected users of F-Secure's Mac OSX beta version, which he claims was a technology preview.

"We're soon going to release a script that will restore the files from trash back to their original locations. If you were affected by this issue, please do not empty your trash in the meantime. See our forum for discussion", he said.

"Obviously this is not nice. We'd like to apologise to anyone affected by this error of ours", he added.

What’s hot on Infosecurity Magazine?