Just as I was writing this post with positive news for AVG users, I was notified about this article at the Register that mentions that AVG is now also detecting non-existing viruses in Adobe Flash: 

AVG, the popular anti-virus package, has falsely identified Adobe Flash as potentially malicious. The snafu comes just days after AVG slapped a bogus Trojan warning on a core Windows component.

Users on AVG forums complained on Friday that Adobe Flash was detected by AVG’s scanner as malicious, following a recent update. 

This has now been fixed, so at least AVG is responding quickly to false positives. There is more good news for users that were affected by the user32.dll false positive disaster earlier this week: AVG is offering you a free license for their free commercial product. Since their website is not reporting this news, I’ll quote the entire press release: 

As a follow-up to the rapid distribution of recovery instructions and repair CDs, AVG Technologies is offering all affected users a free license or license extension as follows:

— For affected users of commercial AVG 7.5 products, a one-year license for the equivalent AVG 8.0 product

— For affected users of commercial AVG 8.0 products, a free license extension for one year

— For affected users of AVG Free products, a free one-year license for AVG Anti-Virus 8.0

Beginning the week of November 24th, 2008, AVG Technologies will contact affected customers and advise them on how they may obtain their complimentary license or license extension.

AVG Technologies apologizes again for the inconvenience caused to our customers and wishes to assure our users worldwide that the company is actively putting new processes in place to avoid similar occurrences in the future.

The main difference between the free and commercial version is that you get support, a browser add-on that scans for malicious websites  and IM protection. A full description of all features can be found here. 

 

So, if you still trust AVG, you can now get a slightly better version for free. This sounds good, but I wonder how this will be distributed. As AVG tells it, they will contact affected customers; how do they know what users were affected? Free users don’t have support, so presumably they didn’t contact AVG about this issue. I’ll keep an eye out for new press releases detailing how they will follow up on this.

YARPP