Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

On Being a False Positive

analysis
Dec 7, 20072 mins

Yesterday, PC Magazine broke the news that Symantec/Norton had "released a virus definition update that incorrectly identified Solid Oak's CyberSitter filtering program as a virus." Naturally, that wreaked havoc on Solid Oak's customer base. To Solid Oak: I sympathize. Years ago, a wrote a simple Web-based performance test for PC Pitstop that Symantec misidentified as a virus. Getting Norton to fix their detecti

Yesterday, PC Magazine broke the news that Symantec/Norton had “released a virus definition update that incorrectly identified Solid Oak’s CyberSitter filtering program as a virus.” Naturally, that wreaked havoc on Solid Oak’s customer base.

To Solid Oak: I sympathize. Years ago, a wrote a simple Web-based performance test for PC Pitstop that Symantec misidentified as a virus. Getting Norton to fix their detection was a long and frustrating process, although it was eventually corrected, more or less. They certainly never apologized, admitted they were wrong, or offered any help to us, our tech support department, or our customers.

Today, there’s still a warning on that particular test page to reassure people who may still have old antiviruses:

Note: Some versions of Norton Antivirus erroneously report the “Sockets de Trois” trojan during the Internet upload test.

I thought I was alone in thinking that, in some ways, Norton Antivirus was worse than the viruses it was intended to combat. Apparently not. The PC Magazine article goes on to say:

This is the third time in less than a year that Symantec’s Norton products have caused severe damage to computers running CYBERsitter software offerings, said Brian Milburn, president of Solid Oak Software, in a statement. “In my opinion, Norton products are worse than any virus I can think of,” he said.

Amen, Brother.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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