A tool for computers needing manual patching is in the works

Mar 11, 2015 21:39 GMT  ·  By

Earlier today, Panda Security rolled out a nasty update that turned against its products and marked essential antivirus files as malware, sending them to quarantine space; a few minutes ago, the company released an automatic fix that restores the wrongly quarantined files.

The unreliable signature file responsible for the disaster has been replaced by the developer, but the trouble is that many systems already adopted the update and fell victim to the consequences.

According to an advisory from the company, the list of affected products includes Panda Cloud Office Protection (both regular and advanced), Panda Antivirus Pro 2015, Panda Internet Security 2015, Panda Global Protection 2015 and Panda Gold Protection.

The recommendation for the affected customers is to not restart their machines. For some users that did reboot the computers, as required by the update, the results were far from pleasant.

System administrators complained online that following the faulty update and a restart, the operating system no longer booted, while in a different instance someone said that all employees had to be sent home, indicating that workstations could no longer be used.

More than seven hours since publishing the advisory on its website, Panda Security issued an update on the matter, saying that the solution for restoring the false positives has been deployed to all affected products.

However, there are numerous complaints from users that have already rebooted their systems, so the automatic patch is useless in their case.

The company announced on Twitter that it is currently working on a tool that offers the possibility to revert the consequences of the bad update via manual installation.