Norton Internet Security crits World of Warcraft, claims its not a critical system file

Filed under: Games, Security, Symantec

In news that makes McAfee's svchost.exe mishap look like a sunny, smiley walk in the park, Symantec and its Norton suite of security tools has found World of Warcraft to be malware. Countless installations of World of Warcraft were destroyed until it was rapidly fixed on Thursday last week.

In fairness, it was quite an easy mistake to make: Symantec uses human analysts to flag programs with suspicious activity, and what's more suspicious than an EXE that runs non-stop for between 16 and 48 hours?

But sadly, I kid: it wasn't WoW.exe that got detected as malware. Rather, it was (presumably) the World of Warcraft Launcher.

Product Manager Kevin Haley said the file was 'analyzing the computer system, making it look suspicious' -- but the irony is (and this is beautiful): the WoW Launcher scans your system to make sure no malware is installed! The Launcher is there to prevent malware and trojans from logging your WoW password, or otherwise interfere with your gaming!

Smooth, Symantec -- maybe do a little more contextual research before flagging files?

[via Neowin]

Norton Internet Security crits World of Warcraft, claims its not a critical system file originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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