Users of Webroot’s endpoint security product, consumers and businesses alike, had a nasty surprise Monday when the program started flagging Windows files as malicious.
The reports quickly popped up on Twitter and continued on the Webroot community forum — 14 pages and counting. The company came up with a manual fix to address the issue, but many users still had problems recovering their affected systems.
The problem is what’s known in the antivirus industry as a “false positive” — a case where a clean file is flagged as malicious and is blocked or deleted. False positive incidents can range in impact from merely annoying — for example, when a program cannot run anymore — to crippling, where the OS itself is affected and no longer boots.
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