Want An Explanation From Bd About Fakealert Fiasco

Spent a beautiful weekend terribly upset and nearly hysterical about the state of two 64 bit computers in my house. One is only 8 weeks old. I was opening a jpg file from my brother when my computer went nuts with virus alerts and quarantine reports, so I ran a deep system scan immediately on both PCs. over 50,000 files were quarantined on my main PC - which means the one with my life and hobbies on it- and thousands more were infecting the other computer, which had recently opened the same jpg file. I assumed that the photo file was infected. Silly me, I never suspected that the company I pay to keep my computers safe just screwed them up. Bitdefender's instructions on what to do with quarantined files that cannot be disinfected is to delete them, so I began to delete 50-100 at a time. I didn't know they were operating system files. I'm not a software engineer. After a few hundred, I quit because it took so long. The other computer runs Windows7 and didn't have quarantined files deleted, and I think it's now okay, although it also required work. The main computer with my life on it is fried. Vista has to be re-installed and I'll lose everything on it. You all know what that also means as to how much work goes into re-loading what's not lost of my life back onto it. Thank God, I have a portable hard drive with back ups, but it's been about a month since I backed up everything and I do genealogy for a hobby, so I'm still going to lose a lot of work and some personal WORD files regarding family business and some picture files. I keep having panic attacks thinking about what was lost and how hard it will be to re-install everything with satellite internet, which limits monthly download bandwidth. A pro technician had to come to our house today because I was afraid of making this even worse. He took my hard drive with him to repair. (trustworthy guy who I have worked with before). Didn't find out it was BDs fault until late Saturday night. Who would have guessed that? Anyway - I WANT AN EXPLANATION of how Bitdefender managed to release an update that devastated millions of their own customers' computers. Not just a "gee - sorry about that, we'll try not to wipe out your hard drive again" kind of statement. My expensive HP computer is my joy. I'm disabled and am losing he ability to do so much that others do without thinking about it. My PC is about all that is left for me to do things without my disability limiting me. I can't sleep. I'm just crushed. I WANT AN EXPLANATION for this ridiculous level of corporate negligence. They're also getting a bill. What ******.

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t0aj15

I'm in the same boat, I've got a new (less then 3 months old) Win 7 64 bit computer that I loaded with the contents of three other computers. YEARS of work that were completely wiped out by the very company I paid to protect all that info. Way to go BitDefender. <img class= " />

L.o.D.

laura mc, have you reinstalled Vista yet?

If not, try to avoid doing a format or you will for sure lose all your work etc.

With Vista, you can do clean install which will move the whole old install to a single folder labelled windows.old. It will have all your genealogy work within that & anything else you may hold dear.

That is, if you have a windows vista install cd. I am not sure that a recovery cd would work the same way.

Joffellis

I'm in the same boat, I've got a new (less then 3 months old) Win 7 64 bit computer that I loaded with the contents of three other computers. YEARS of work that were completely wiped out by the very company I paid to protect all that info. Way to go BitDefender. " />

Same probs computer 4 months old (win 7 64bit) have been using BD for 5 years plus no probs then fake 5 hit!!! Made an efort to rid using BD but then the PC refused to boot - no go - totally up the creak!!

Have had to reinstal win 7 from cd and start again. Not a happy bunny lost all my programs so will have to instal again - time will tick and It will be a day wasted!! <img class= " />

oscarville

laura mc, have you reinstalled Vista yet?

If not, try to avoid doing a format or you will for sure lose all your work etc.

With Vista, you can do clean install which will move the whole old install to a single folder labelled windows.old. It will have all your genealogy work within that & anything else you may hold dear.

That is, if you have a windows vista install cd. I am not sure that a recovery cd would work the same way.

I consider myself lucky in this regard - I have a really good computer technician. This guy worked some unGodly amount of hours and was able to restore my hard drive. There were some files that would just not move out of the quarrantine, so I still may have some program problems down the line, but I didn't have to re-install a ton of programs and updates, and I didn't lose all data since my last back-up to a portable hard drive. He fixed it without BD's instructions. At one point, I sent him instructions I received from BD that morning and he tried to follow them, but their instructions made it worse and he had to work two more hours to get back to where he was before BD's "help." The guy is really good, but even he was ready at one time to throw in the towel on it and just wipe it clean. No - I didn't have the OS disks. My version was factory installed.

It was a terribe clusterf____k on BDs part. Today, they offered me a whopping 6 month extension of their service. My tech's bill will dwarf that, not to mention all of my lost time before he took over.

I'm out a lot of money here, as are many others. I keep asking for an address to send the tech's invoice and a bill for my own time. I'm getting the feeling that they're going to stick us with our financial losses until they're forced to make restitution through a lawsuit.

If others were less inconvenienced and experienced less financial loss, I'm happy for them. However, those of us who suffered much greater damages should be made whole. A 6 month extension of a service I lost faith in doesn't do it for me.

Thanks for your concern and advice.

Railroader

I had about the same problem as everyone else, I deleted the quarantined files, then my computer would not boot, so I tried to restore from a backup, that failed as they usually do in my case, and corrupted my partition, when I tried to reinstall, windows could not find my hard drive, so I bought a new hard drive and reinstalled windows, and all my apps, but I lost a lot of info and files. I have been working on it for two days, I am thankful that I did not turn on my other windows 7, 64 bit machine, over the weekend, it appears not to have been infected.

kungfu

Can the Question from the original poster be answered ?

I WANT AN EXPLANATION of how Bitdefender managed to release an update that devastated millions of their own customers' computers.

LOD maybe ?

L.o.D.

LOD maybe ?

I could not even begin to guess at what happened.

BitMonts

Many of us are wondering the same thing.

Was this a malicious act by a disgruntled employee? Was it a typo, or some sort of accident?

I am a relatively new user to BD, and there has been a lot of bashing, perhaps deservedly so, but I imagine this could happen with any of the competing products.

What steps are being taken so this does not happen again?

kungfu

I could not even begin to guess at what happened.

Ty for your reply,hopefully an Employee/Mod will answer then...

Many of us are wondering the same thing.

Was this a malicious act by a disgruntled employee? Was it a typo, or some sort of accident?

I am a relatively new user to BD, and there has been a lot of bashing, perhaps deservedly so, but I imagine this could happen with any of the competing products.

What steps are being taken so this does not happen again?

Thats my question too, " Was this a malicious act by a disgruntled employee? Was it a typo, or some sort of accident? "

TheBigPJ

If you read the big thread carefully.

They didnt actually test the update. And still where asking people hours later what OS they were running? So even after they knew about there bad update they themselves still didnt run it it seems.

There times of when they released the patch is a few hours off. 11.30 AM PST no, more like 1PM PST. Its all in the big forum thread. And a fix to this fiasco was not released till around 5PM PST. They claimed this patch was released 8.30 AM PST, so thats about 8 hours without any advice or a fix.

Adding insult to injurt there own team advised restarting at one point which was the worst thing to do.

But I will give them this - they have one ###### of a PR team. See the dates and times of news articles and youll notice, during this 8 hour period there PR were on the ball. Talking to all news sites interested.

+10 for PR team.

-20 for support.

-100 for there production team.

L.o.D.

If you read the big thread carefully.

They didnt actually test the update.

Where did they say that or are you assuming that is the case?

Got a link to the post?

And still where asking people hours later what OS they were running?

That is what you do when you are troubleshooting.

You can't give Xp advice to someone on Vista/Win7.

Why would they not ask people what OS they are running when trying to help people with the issue?

You can't give general advice & hope it covers all operating systems.

Vista/Win7 are very different operating systems compared to XP.

Locations will be different etc.

People were trying to find where their quarantine folder was which will not be in the same place for both.

kungfu

Still No Reply, Why is that to the Question

Thats my question too, " Was this a malicious act by a disgruntled employee? Was it a typo, or some sort of accident? "

Why doesnot a Employee/Mod replies and explains what has happened..................................

unknown

Hello all,

We are very sorry for the late reply. In order to answer to your questions please read the new announcement on the forum, Announcement: Message from Florin Talpes, BitDefender CEO regarding FakeAlert situation.

Thank you.