CA Internet Security Suite Win32/ASuspect False Positive

Win32/ASuspect is the latest message users of CA Internet Security Suite are seeing beginning last night February 22nd 2010.

CA is reporting wuweb.dll as a Win32/ASuspect Trojan and automatically placing it in quarantine. This file is part of Windows Update process which is now failing to execute.

I support several customers using CA Internet Security Suite and all have reported seeing this error message. I've done some checking on the web and CA Support forums have lit up like a christmas tree. However because I'm a cautious man I submitted a copy of quarantined wuweb.dll to virustotal.com and as expected results came back clean.

Looks like we have another case of CA False Positive. I'm sure CA will fix this quickly by pushing out new signatures however what worries me is the frequency because CA had a case of false positive last year in 2009 and secondly I'm not seeing much about this on their website. As a good corporate citizen I think CA should be informing their customers about such problems quickly. Consultants such as myself get these frantic phone calls from clients; then we spend our valuable time investigating such matters only to find its a false positive. It would save me much headache if CA could post a message to their Forum or website.

Come on CA I expect better from you.

Google BUZZ ~ Why are people over reacting?

Google once the darling of the online community has recently fallen out of favour. It's at the forefront of a huge backlash over its newly introduced social media service BUZZ.

What I don't understand is why are people over reacting? I mean come on folks what did you think was going to happen with the obscene amount of personal information Google is sitting on at this moment. Google is a for profit corporation; it's not in this for charity reasons. Someone has to pay for all these free services you've taken for granted. Before Gmail there was Hotmail and Yahoo Mail which at one point or another were paid services that is if you wanted a decent amount of storage space for your email. Then along came Google giving everyone 1Gig of FREE storage. At the time this was a bold and unprecedented move. But did you really think this was all for nothing. Come on what kind of fairy tale do you live in? Nothing is FREE. So get over it and move on.

Google has spent millions on their hardware infrastructure and giving it away free for years. At some point they have to figure out how to pay for all this investment. Well BUZZ is just the beginning, this fairytale you've been living is coming to an end. When someone gives you something free with the left hand its only a matter of time before they'll be reaching out with their right hand looking for payment.

Google has an obscene amount of information stored. We've all been happily giving all sorts of personal data to Google and now that they're trying to use it we absolutely freak out. If you don't like it don't use Gmail. Go back to using a local email client like you did in the 90's.

Besides take a minute and review how much personal information people are freely giving away to Facebook and other similar services. If you're happy to give it away to Facebook why are you freaking out if Google uses something you've given away long ago when you signed up for Gmail or Google Docs? If you don't like it stop using their services, it's your choice.