Antivirus Company, Sophos, Screw-Up Blocks Users of Windows from Logging In

False positive by Sophos, antivirus company, made several users of Windows 7 SP1 unable to login anymore into their operating system on previous Sunday. The company notifies on the website that it has wrongly marked 'winlogon.exe' as a spyware or virus.

The team of Sophos was readily available for fixing the problem and has made announcement about their snafu in the early hours of Sunday morning, providing the emergency update for fixing their database of virus signature, and eradicate the wrong virus detection.

The main issue was the Sophos signature, which marked "C: WindowsSystem32winlogon.exe" as infected with Troj/FarFli-CT spyware, as well as blocked access of Windows to this vital file which is de-facto executable for Logon screen.

As per Sophos, the issue simply has affect on a particular 32-bit version of Windows 7 SP1 and not on Windows Vista, XP, 8 or 10.

The company issued a supporting article stating that: "based on current case volume and customer feedback, we believe the number of impacted systems to be minimal and confined to a small number of cases".

Pcworld.com posted on September 5th, 2016, stating that an affected Twitter user by this issue had his doubts about lesser number of affected customers, and another user told that he has not been able to reach the Sophos Support on phone for more than two hours.

The antivirus company further observes that in few cases (as per the policy in force and depending on whether a user attempts to login before fix reached its place), users may well witness a black screen at the time of login. Users affected by this problem are advised to boot into the Safe Mode and disable the automatic start-up of the Sophos.

Sophos claims that false positive just affected "a specific version of 32-bit Windows 7" with Service Pack 1 applied, and not any newer operating system versions. As per the company, the problem has affected simply fewer numbers of systems.

Certainly, this is not the problem with Sophos only. Several other vendors also suffered from same problems during the past, and will surely continue to do so in future.

» SPAMfighter News - 9/12/2016