Kaspersky inadvertently quarantines Windows Explorer

Windows Explorer, one of the most crucial components of Microsoft's operating system, was quarantined earlier this week after being falsely identified as malicious code by an antivirus company.

Users of Kaspersky Lab's antivirus products noticed the issue, which Kaspersky claimed lasted two hours, on Wednesday night.

The security company's systems had decided that a virus called Huhk-C was present in the explorer.exe file, leading to its confinement or, in some cases, deletion. As Windows Explorer is the graphical user interface (GUI) for Windows' file system, this made it difficult to perform many common tasks within the operating system, such as finding files.

David Emm, a senior technology consultant at Kaspersky Lab, told ZDNet UK on Friday that the company was still examining its checklist to find out why the false positive "slipped through the net."

"This is classic false-alarm territory," Emm said. "We will check through our systems and see if we can tighten them up so we don't run into this problem in the future. No antivirus company, including ourselves, can say they have never had a false alarm, (but) on all fronts, we do what we can to minimize any potential risk for our customers."

Emm pointed out that Kaspersky adds about 3,000 records per week to its database, demonstrating the "scale of the issue, in terms of testing procedures."

The "offending signature" went out at around 7 p.m. on Wednesday, according to Emm, who claimed that it was pulled two hours later in a "makeshift" attempt to limit the damage while Kaspersky examined the signature.

"We proactively went out to our enterprise customers to make them aware there was this potential issue," Emm said. "Only one corporate customer (in the U.K.) encountered this problem, as well as a handful of home users." He added that users who have not changed their default settings would have found explorer.exe to be only quarantined, rather than deleted.

In March of this year, Kaspersky criticized Microsoft's consumer antivirus product, OneCare, for incorrectly quarantining and, in some cases, deleting Microsoft Outlook files.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

[pinowudi]

Not necessarily a false positive

Considering there are newly released malicious codes that inject
directly into the Windows Explorer memory space, Kaspersky's
deetction is neither invalid or a false positive. At that point
Windows Explorer is a malicious process that needs to be
mitigated. Note that it is not replacing explorer.exe as many
previous virii have attempted. It is mangling the legitimate copy
as it is running to achieve it's ends.

One example:
http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/security_response/weblog
/2007/08/the_new_peacomm_infection_tech.html

[Anon-Y-mous]

Explorer.exe *IS* malicious code. They were right

Explorer.exe and IExplorer.exe are the two things that let everything bad into a windows system. Therefore by definition it IS malicious. Delete it and replace with a real OS and you'll be much safer.

[i_made_this]

Kapsersky Maybe Right

In general, this false positive ironically agrees with a positive on windows explorer executable in continuous use as an "undefined process" (and thus never wholly safe) by Microsoft Corp. MSFT enterprise security as well as retail security products, while not outright banning or quaranteening explorer both keep in a suspended state of being a "dangerous process."

[jeffgtr60]

Thumbs Up Kaspersky

Now if Kaspersky could just find a way to quarantine IE from the net the world would be a better place. Untold amounts of money and time would be saved coding standards compliant websites. The general health and well being of webdesigners all over the planet would improve resulting in a slight decrease in health care costs. Web users could breath a sigh of relief that the web would at least be a slightly safer place. Ahhh one can at least dream can't they?

[Penguinisto]

Shouldn't that be "iexplore.exe"?

"explorer.exe" is the main 'doze file browser, and the taskbar (among a ton of other services) rely on it.

"iexplore.exe" is the bug-ridden, standards-hating, lock-in-generating web broswer thingy.

/P

[sktuarim]

I would love to have explorer quarantined!

With as many problems over the years with explorer windows freezing up or just plain not working, maybe it should be quarantined. It is not as if Microsoft will correct the problems within Windows.

[hawkeyeaz1]

I've also heard of

McAfee on a Vista machine flagging (and trying to remove) msconfig/System Configuration Utility. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do much more analyzing with it.

[ncftech]

what a blunder....

it was supposed to quarantine Windows Vista....(ALL FILES). . Sorry MSFT, Vista suuuuuuxxxxxxx......

[mytetteh]

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[as901]

Kaspersky quarantines-Windows-Explorer?

Perhaps they see Windows as a virus? I do.

[wbenton]

You need to place this in the computer humor section

>>>Windows Explorer, one of the most crucial components of Microsoft's operating system<<<

That lead line just about sums up a whole bunch of Microsoft's security problems!

If IE is one of the most crucial components of Microsoft's OS, then they're doomed to fail one of these days.

IE is the most insecure browser in the world... and Microsoft freely opens it's OS innards up to IE in a way that no other manufacturer's application could do because they use so many secret built-in holes to get IE to do the insecure things the way it does!

If Microsoft ever opened up all their secrets about IE, you'd find 90% or more of Microsoft security woes wrapped up in this one nutshell!

Walt