ESET Nod32 Blocks Facebook Image Attachments

The latest virus signature database of ESET's Nod32 Antivirus 4 seems to block out all the images attached to Facebook posts.

This morning, my colleagues and I discovered that after the latest updates were made, a warning appeared at the bottom of the screen when visiting Facebook profiles, alerting that a certain URL address has been blocked.

It's very unlikely that the whole network of computers (including those from another location) would have such a serious infection to cause these alerts to appear.

The most likely scenario is that ESET's latest definition update includes a bug that detects all the attachments found on Facebook profiles as being threats.

So far Nod 32 Antivirus has been reliable and it hasn't presented such malfunctions but now clearly something is wrong.

At the beginning of August, the same type of problem was detected by ESET, but in that case the whole thing might have been caused by a malicious toolbar installed in certain internet browsers. This time it couldn't be a toolbar because the warning shows up even when opening a Facebook page on a newly installed browser.

I've sent a message to ESET on the issue to see how they'll respond to the matter. Meanwhile, tell us if you have encountered the same problem and if you are aware of what's causing this behavior.

Everytime you encounter false positives, it's wise to submit the files or websites that might be blocked by mistake to the developer so they can take care of the problem. This way you can help improve the anti-virus software, aiding yourself and others who use the same applications.

For ESET product users, you can submit any files and URLs to their knowledge base in just a few easy-to-follow steps.

Updates will be made on the matter as soon as the security solutions provider will return with an answer.

UPDATE: ESET representatives replied "It is a false positive of our scanner and this issue will be fixed in our next signature update."

UPDATE 2: The false positive has been fixed in signature update 6476. Congratulations to ESET for addressing the issue so quickly.