HSBC’s Website Faces False Trojan Warning from Kaspersky Lab

A fake security alert by a Russian security firm Kaspersky left the users of its Internet Security software fearing that website of HSBC was containing malware, reported The Register on August 17, 2009.

According to the reports, once a user visits the HSBC website, Kaspersky's software claimed that HTML-Agent-CE Trojan has been downloaded on his/her PC.

In its statement, the security firm said that this mistake arose on August 14, 2009 and was fixed within no time.

The false positive was noted on the HSBC's UK Internet banking website. Kaspersky Lab stated that it is witnessing nearly 30,000 new online threats on a daily basis and thus, a fix for some issue could rarely have certain unintended results.

Trying to defend itself, the security firm said that it takes all such issues very seriously. It also claimed that the firm has a well-placed and intense processing and testing systems that could ably prevent such situations for partners and clients.

Kaspersky Lab has also apologized HSBC as well as its British clients for the inconvenience they had to face because of the unnecessary security alert that gave rise to a lot of confusion among the HSBC customers.

Other security firms told The Register on August 17, 2009 that they didn't find anything malicious on the website of HSBC. In other words, there was no such Trojan or malicious code on the bank's website that could infect the systems of visitors.

HSBC's incident is the best example to take a lesson from, stated security experts and urged online banking customers not to lose patience on encountering such incidents. In addition to this, they also advised users to have complete information on the Internet security so that instead of panicking, they may adopt apposite measures to block the malicious code from downloading on their PCs.

Meanwhile, false positive incident has not only occurred with Kaspersky Lab, but all security vendors suffer from the problem from time-to-time. Usually, such incidents involve misjudging an application, or a system file, as malware after a virus definition update. On some occasions, legitimate scripts may also be taken as malign code, as in this latest incident with Kaspersky.

Related article: HSBC Alerts Customers of Hoax E-Mail

» SPAMfighter News - 9/3/2009