False alarm issued by Avast Antivirus

Apr 29, 2008 08:52 GMT  ·  By

Avast Antivirus and uTorrent have only a few things in common: they are extremely popular among their segments of users even if one of them is an antivirus solution while the other is a BitTorrent client. Moreover, both of them are free, which obviously raises their popularity among the users looking for such software packages. Although it's well known the fact that uTorrent is 100 percent clean, due to an unexpected bug, Avast Antivirus has marked the BitTorrent client as Trojan horse and removed it from the clients' computers.

In a forum post published on the main Avast website, a user named Rathma informed that Avast Antivirus removed uTorrent from the computer and it also blocks the download from the official website. "It doesn't give me the option to ignore it and open, just abort connection," the user wrote.

According to the photo he posted on the forums, the antivirus flagged uTorrent 1.7.7 as Win32.Poison-DU [Trj], but the other versions, namely the 1.8 beta, were unaffected.

Although users could not download the application while Avast was running, some of them found a simple workaround: they added uTorrent to the exclusion list. To do so, simple right click on the Avast icon in your System Tray, click on Program settings, go over to Exclusion and click on Add. Then, depending on the location of uTorrent, add the executable file (the default is C:Program Files uTorrent).

After a few hours, the Avast team rolled out a virus definition update which corrected the false alarm and removed uTorrent 1.7.7 from the Trojan list. So, in case you're one of the affected users and the problem hasn't been fixed yet, hit the update button and get the latest patches for Avast.

If you wish to download the latest version of uTorrent, including the beta and the stable ones, you can find them straight on Softpedia, using this link.