Long story short, rather than doing something productive, I’m undoing a mess created by the near-final beta of Trend Micro for Windows 7.
I was installing the betas in a random pattern across the machines, to find out which one would give me the most headache. And, we have a winner!
Long story short, some of my phone modification tools were declared hacking malware, and instantly quarantined. But wait, there’s more! The antivirus software then filled up my hard drive with multiple copies. Then, it went into the zip files, and flagged those as infected too (and by zip files, I mean web site backups… gigabytes in size).
Long story short, I probably have another half hour to go to undo the mess. Trend Micro, you’ve come a long way from the ActiveX scanning tools of long ago… and not in the right direction. If an antivirus software is going to start quarantining several gigabytes of data… it should at least prompt the user and check. This is no different than a computer receiving a request to open all email… Mail is smart enough to say “whoa, do you really want to do this?”
The only difference here is, these were false-positives, I didn’t do anything to warrant this action from Trend Micro. Hopefully Microsoft’s Morro won’t be as abusive…