Compensation For False-positive Of Trojan.fakealert.5?

And how are you going to prove that you got severely affected by BD? Because if they start offering compensation, anyone could just pop at their door claiming they, too, had to reinstall 100 PCs that day and would like some money for that.

I don't want bitdefender's money - just that they have some courtesy for loyal customers that are running 64bit systems. Offer some type of extended subscription and an apology - it won't even cost them much to do that and would go a long way to give loyal customers such as myself a bit of satisfaction. It's would be smart business practice too. People that weren't affected, won't even know about the offer but at least they offer something as a "sorry, we screwed up" to the people who this really maddened and came here to vent.

That sounds pretty reasonable.

They could have a link to an extended license option for x64 systems, as opt-in with name, address and so on. The link could be online for 3-7 days, after that the word could spread and anyone would get it whether they got affected by the situation or not (which, by the way, only lasted a few hours, until detecting false positives stopped).

Some of you are real jokers. You didn't get hurt by this mess so you talk like it's no big deal.

Not sure if you were directing this at me, I merely stated that Ive seen it happen before not with an antivirus no but similar results.

The real jokers are the ones going, "im gonna sue" Yeah right thats the biggest load ive ever seen.

word wouldn't spread that quick and it would only be for 64bit systems that we actually affected and could even be for a short time ensuring only people we came here to complain got it. People that were not affected wouldn't complain nor come here to vent. It's pointless thinking for bitdefender, they know better how to make it happen with minimal loss to them. So far they have only dodged the topic of compensation.

I edited my reply while you were writing.

Here it is again:

They could have a link to an extended license option for x64 systems, as opt-in with name, address and so on. The link could be online for 3-7 days, after that the word could spread and anyone would get it whether they got affected by the situation or not (which, by the way, only lasted a few hours, until detecting false positives stopped).

I've been using Nvidia and ATI cards for decades, their drivers have NEVER *@*#$ my machine - issues yes but never have I had to reinstall my OS from scratch.

Food is cold, hot outside? wtf are you talking about??? I'm talking all day non-stop computer repair over software that is suppost to protect us - if it failed and some virus hit us it wouldn't hurt so much - that happens but the anti-virus software itself hitting us??

What does MAC have to do with this issue?

wha... LOL

forget suing anyone, BD should compensate it's loyal customers that got @#$@!

The point was that whenever people have a problem with something the first thing that comes trough their minds is seeking compensation or suing . Just take a look on other forums and see how many people had to reinstall because of bad drivers.

The point with MAC was that it's supposed to be very reliable and secure and never crashes , + you wont need anti virus, but then again it comes with a price.

I wouldn't mind getting a free 1 year subscription but I don't mind if i won't get it either

I got that warm and fuzzy feeling already

I can't wait to open my present! I think another 3 computer license key would be good, that way we get a little something free and we could give it away to a new customer that would eventually renew their subscription. Sounds like a win win.... or customers could have a choice to either get a free year subscription extension or the free key... options are nice too. I can't see anyone pushing for more than that.

I think the compensation should only be available while logging in with your current x64 BD subscription key, your name and address.

That would screen out some freebie hunters.

You say you (as Bitdefender) are serious. Why is there not a MASSIVE notice on your website saying you stuffed up, what the problem is and offer a couple of solutions. Most PC users are not clued up enough to even know what a forum is or even how to get to it.

Actions speak louder than words, and your actions so far has to try and keep this quiet showing your disrespect for the public. No public announcement such as an email.

I fully agree with Adrian here. I will repost what I posted in the other thread

I use Windows 7 64bit with Bitdefender Internet Security 2010 and for me I saw this thread disabled the real time protection. Luckily I did not reboot and restored the quarantined files manually. For me no system files were lost. BUT I am posting here to express my disgust at the shocking response or the lack of it from the support team. People kept on repeating the questions and these tech guys were either too late or didn't respond at all. and abt this fellow ' L.o.D. ', who is this arrogant jackass? Throw him out. Look at his initial responses, just complicated the whole situation. I can to an extent consider this fiasco to be a human error but the way in which the tech people handled the panic amongst the customers is shocking. I had recommended this product to my brother and also my friend, I made my friend to uninstall her Mcafee for this, I called her to know if anything is wrong but luckily she is using Vista 32 bit. She sort of ridiculed me for my recommendation. I can certainly take that. But what about the monetary damages and the humiliation suffered by many people who use their PC for business purposes? The shoddy service has deepened their agony.

I feel sorry for all the people who lost their money and time due to this issue. Some of my online techie pals have advised me to shift to another security soltion and either use Windows Firewall or move to another paid one. Well I haven't decided yet....

I'm really trying to decide if I should stay with this company. Paying for a program that ultimately unleashes the most devastating attack comparable to the worst of all viruses of course doesn't really make sense, so I really do think it's fair that people get their money back for this. I was lucky to avert the worst of it by choosing to ignore all detected files and shut the program down asap, but the majority of affected users are not computer savvy people on these forums, they are probably calling their friend to come and fix their computer or something.

Even though a refund is perfectly reasonable to expect in my opinion, i would be willing to settle at this stage for extended subscription to give this company another shot. I'm sure it's likely that they will not make this mistake again. Surely their testing procedures will undergo an overhaul. Primarily, I want reassurance and details on what is being done to prevent this, and I really do want details on the changes to testing procedures. I just need information to reassure me that things are being done right so I can try to remove bitdefenders image of the most dangerous compononent of my computer from my mind and feel that it's reasonable to pay them for protecting me.

I understand that everyone makes mistakes, but in all honesty, even with a reasonable mind, it's difficult to 'feel' comfortable using this software after the recent attack. Changing and getting use to new antivirus software is annoying enough to make me want a reason to trust bitdefender though, so despite my negative feelings right now, with an extension of license and some official and serious documentation of testing and operating procedures, I may stay. Many will of course probably abandon this software even with a lifetime subscription lol, but here's to hoping for a realistic and respectable conclusion. I still really don't know what software I will go with.

An official statement was posted here: http://news.bitdefender.com/NW1431-en--Tro...date-issue.html

Link to this article is right on the main page, www.bitdefender.com, under Press Center.

Note the word MASSIVE, it is the key to that sentence. WOW, that is a MASSIVE link under Press Center, wonder how i managed to missed that.

"What you test is what you get" is on top of that article, it a little ironic isn't it.

Annoyed is not the word, I now have to re-install my operating system! I want out, full refund and will make sure to spread the word to avoid this terrible virus (yes it is a Virus)

It is good news that you guys are aware of damage you have done. First I was really mad because something like that happened. I even join the forum in order to get any answer why it happened because there was no warning or apology by the BitDefender team. All antivirus programs show false alarms and sometimes even remove the system files. There is no perfect antivirus program. But nevertheless I still believe in your product. The only mistake you made is that you did not send an email, marked as important, to your customers with short instruction of what to do if thay have x64 OS, to prevent the fall of the system, which unfortunately happened to me.

I agree with the Midnight Rain that there should be a way to separate freebie hunters from people who are really affected by this error.

Keep up the good work as you did it before this accident.

Hello,

Even I've been deeply affected by yesterday's issue, I have managed to restore all my data...so no data loss only weekend time.

As a "private virus fighter" and Bitdefender customer I may say that indeed Bitdefender is the best on the market so far...

As an example, two years ago my computer was protected with a different AV and while that software reports that the computer was clean...the virus popped up tons of messages on my desktop!!! The I installed various brand name AV and did the scan with...same result....clean computer!

The ONLY AV that detected the virus (but not cleaning it as it was brand new) was Bitdefender. At least it indicated me the infected files then I did the cleaning procedure myself (and published it on forums). So, since then I became a BD customer.

And despite the yesterday's huge mistake (that got me angry!) I will still be with them.

To put it in a balance...I may say that BD is doing more good then bad...

Regards

I was one of the lucky ones, well lucky in the way that I have a laptop not running BD so I was able to get onto the forums to see why my computer would not reboot. I feel for the people who just could not reboot and have no idea why.

On the side of compensation its a very difficult one, personaly I havent lost anything it was just a bit of inconvenice finding out how to fix the problem, for many who have no computer skill other than pressing the on button it may be a lot worse. I would be happy for an extension to my licence to see if they have learned from this very important, unfortunate lesson.

As you wish now, but seriously, I lost more than 3200$ for my three computers.

How can you have *lost* $3200? What you lose is your time, and, maybe, some data. It's not as if BitDefender has destroyed your hardware. Just reinstall Windows.

If you think you've lost that masterpiece of a novel you've been writing over the years, and haven't got a backup, then don't panic. A disk drive is a disk drive, and data can be recovered. In the simplest instance this just means taking the disk drive out and hookit up on another PC, and copying the data off. The last thing you want to do is reformat, and kiss gooodbye to pictures, audio files, documents etc.

This whole episode is a disaster, but it's not terminal. And I know it's easy to say, but "don't panic".

Kieran

Look, I've had the same problem as most of you here. BD started placing system files in quarantine. It actually tells you: Hey, look ######, there is a huge number of files I'm not letting you access anymore. There is some nasty virus here. I'm placing them in this box right here.

I started wondering where that could have come from. Taking a good look I realized there was absolutely NO disinfection going on, only placing files in a cage. This, to me, started looking less like a virus. The probability of detecting thousands of infected files and getting none cleaned is minimal.

When you see your system files trapped in quarantine unable to access them what do you do first? Well, apparently to many, rebooting seems to be the solution. Surely, that should magically bring everything back to normal.

Well, if anyone used their intuition, they would know that would bring the computer to its knees, whether you had a virus or not. Rebooting with hundreds of trapped system files is the worst thing anyone could have done.

What did I do? I stopped the protection and began restoring some of the files, to see if they still work. After all, if you're infected, what's the big loss? They did work, so I started google-ing the problem. I saw it's not just me, so that meant there is something wrong with BD.

It all depends on how you set the action for infected files. If you left them on default, you shouldn't have any deleted files.

"OK dude, your BD didn't leave any serious damage, good for you, what's your point for the rest of us who have been reinstalling all the software?"

My point is that, although BD is to be held responsible, many panicked and were unable to tell the difference between a real infection and suspicious behavior of the antivirus and just made things worse when they could have limited the action of the situation themselves.

That's all.

Midnight Rain - I'm glad you can be so smug about your abilities and the fact you were not badly affected. Unfortunately, there are people who use this product who are not as computer savvy - hence why the company publicizes the fact bitdefender is aimed at the novice user!

Your criticizing comments help no one.

After a long night to get systems running again i think i also can tell my thoughts for compensation.

Since i support some people and recommended them to use 64 Bit Systems and Bitdefender, yesterday i recognised again how fast users can loose trust in a product which they loved before.

For that i think there are some ways to give compansation to customers who had problems yesterday:

1. For the people which still want to use Bitdefender there should be a compansation by adding a free 1 year license of their product.

2. for those which have lost their trust in the Bitdefender Products there the only way to compansate them is to recharge their money they paid for their licenses, at least procentually to their remaining license time.

3. Any other costs for system repair by experts which are a result of the disaster yesterday happened, have to be taken over by bitdefender.

4. Give support over a toll free 24 h support number in ALL countrys of the world and check all linked mail adresses to support forms on your Web Page. This i'll be explaing in a moment.

5. Change the Quarantaine Function in the Program, a restore from there is a pain in the ######. And please, if the program recomends to make a new install of Bitdefender, which it did after it killed it's auto update function: leave the quaratained files on the system where they are. No moving, deleting, etc. For some Reinstalls of Bitdefender 2010 you first have to uninstall the remainings from your system, and with that, all quarantained files are gone too.

To the Support Issue i told on point 4:

At 16:40 CET yesterday i recognised the first problems on a machine with the malicious update right after the update was provided to this PC. The first file on the system which was quarantined was a file i programmed myself with only one function, which couldn't harm the system, but it was followed by many more files until i got to stop the realtime scan engine.

I extracted all files from the quarantaine and scanned with 5 other scanners, all resulted in no malicious code found.

So at 17:20 CET i was sure that there was a problem with the update of bitdefender and now i tried to contact Bitdefender Support.

First Attemp was by phone. I live in Germany, so i called the german support hotline: Surprise, the german line is only active from monday to friday 8am to 8pm.

No hint to an international phone service.

Next Try: The realtime chat system: at this point your website wasn't working in a use speed anymore, so at about 18:10 CET i was able to get to the realtime chat system, where i posted my question to a bad update file from bitdefender. No answer, you ask for about 5 minutes to wait for a reply, after 15 minutes without answering you will be switched to a support forn, where you can leave your questions and describe your problems, which i did and hit the send button.

Since you asked for the email adress, there it should be no problem to send a copy to the person, which contacted you. The mails seem to go to the adress:

support@bitdefender.com. But as i learned from an autoreply 2 hours late, this mail doesen't seem to be in use anymore:

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----

Von: BitDefender Support Team [mailto:support@bitdefender.com]

Gesendet: Samstag, 20. März 2010 20:55

An: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Betreff: Auto-reply from BitDefender Customer Care

In order to improve our response time to our customers, we have implemented a new and improved online support contact form. To access this form, please visit http://www.bitdefender.com/site/contact/1/. You will see that the department 'Support' is already selected, so all you need to do is select the product that you use. Based upon your selection criteria, you will be automatically redirected to the corresponding contact form.

In addition to contacting support, you can find answers and solutions to common questions and issues in our online knowledge base, available at http://www.bitdefender.com/help.

Please be aware that the support@bitdefender.com email address is no longer in use, and emails sent to this address will not be answered. Please use our online contact form to contact our support team.

Thank you for your support.

BitDefender Customer Care Team

I tried the live chat system over and over again at later times, but it didn't work or i sat again 15 minutes waiting for a reply and after to have the possibilty to send again a mail to a adress which is no longer in use, which i did one more time.

For my part, i had an interesting evening and night to provide people help to get their systems working again and their data back. Some of them now are using other security software, cause they no longer trust a software which acts like the worst malware. Some of them wnt to use their Bitdefender further on. Non of them have suffered great damage, with one exception.

The exception is me, cause there was one pc i only can access remote, which i couldn't access fast enough to disable the realtime scan engine. This PC isn't working anymore and worst, it also killed files from a file server (thank god there is a backup), which is now my work for today to set up both again.

For me i also lost my trust in bitdefender software, so with remaining 198 days of bitdefender service, i would want to get a recharge of a half year supscription.

And Bitdefender, get your support reorganised, that's the best compensation you can give your remaining customers! The biggest disaster yesterday was the reaction of the support team.

@Jens H

Very reasonable response.

I am fortunate enough to only be a home user of the bitdefender product, but I too have felt the pain.

Night Rain, please read Jens H post - it is an example of how to add something constructive.

My system is now functioning (I hope as normal) after following the knowledge base article and running the patch - I had to delete 24842 files from the quarantine folder after the patch had run... only time will tell if the PC will remain stable and the issue has been resolved.

For me personally, I intend to continue using bitdefender, but for my family and friends who I have recommended to, well, I would totally understand if they decide to use another product.

For me, an extended license for bitdefender antivirus 2010 would be a start, but honestly £19.95 is not much compensation for my time lost.

Jens H, I agree with your sentiments that bitdefender could have handled this much better from a customer service and support point of view - if this had happened to my family members they would have struggled to find any information on the cause or how to resolve the issue and would certainly not have thought to use a forum.

Bitdefender, i hope you're listening.

When I say "lost", is the fact that those computers aren't chea.p at all.I lost my office work and personnal datas, and finally my computers wouldn't reinstall Windows and now they won't turn on again, I just feel like I'm gonna have a hard time at the office, but I can still get some of my work back I know that.

(Sloppy face)

Hold on, what do you mean a computer won't 'turn on'. There is a big difference between a computer not powering up, and it being able to load/run Windows etc. The BitDefender problem impacted on software, not hardware.

Kieran

finally my computers wouldn't reinstall Windows and now they won't turn on again

Forgive me for intruding here, but as it was already said, BitDefender is a software. It doesn't take actions against your hardware and/or BIOS. So however a software, any software, might blow up, the system itself (the actual hardware system, not the Operating System) should always be capable of booting up from an auxiliary device (such as another HDD, a CD/DVD drive, maybe even a flash device or network drives if your mother board supports it). If this isn't possible for you, then the problem lies somewhere in the BIOS booting settings, not in anything that BitDefender might have done.

Cris.

typical society of mindless people, mistakes happen, it was easy to fix, get over it. If you dont like it, dump bitdefender, and go buy Norton and see how many more issues you will have.

If you read the terms of service, you will understand that things like this are covered, as you allready agreed to it, wait you didnt read them did you!!! lol.

Typical

ITS NOT EASY TO FIX. My PC is rendered completely useless as even bit defender has quarantined itself, NOTHING works, I cant even open files. If I turn off my PC I have to boot it from disc because otherwise it goes into an endless spiral of startup repair not being able to fix itself.

I have to pay an IT technician to take out my hard drive, transfer my files over to a new drive then I have to re-install windows from scratch and reinstall everything - REAL EASY TO FIX. Not to mention that I am now unable to work until Wednesday which is when I get my PC back.

The worst PC problem I have ever had has been caused by the company who are meant to protect me - this is surely the end for Bit Defender, you dont come back from this.

It's Friday night and I'm going to have some fun. I know this is a real stretch for some of your uber-nerd fanboys on here who are cozyin' up to BitDefender like they paid their college tuition or sumtin'.

Anyway, I get me a pack of JimmieCoats from the pharmacy and proceed to go an perform said fun activity.

Now, the little lady I'm with is clean as can be. We have at it and next thing I know, I got me a case of the drips. That's right, the condom that was supposed to protect me from infection actually gave me an STD.

Now sure a little shot can cure it. It didn't give the HIV or even the Herps. Nonetheless, this has really f'd up my weekend.

Now, I'm not even tryin' to shake down the pharmacy for some pills or whatever. I jsut want my money back and the clerk behind the counter looks at me and says, 'just use another one the next time, it'll be ok.'

Not only that, but there's some aholes who didn't even get the gonorrhea who tellin' me to take it easy. You know how mad I'm gettin' now?

Give me my f'in money back you POS.

TheBigPJ, I am just curious as to how many computers you are running that you are not capable of maintaining in any way?

That is how you come off with calling an IT guy at 2AM.

BTW, how are you guys having BD delete files when no such setting exists that I can find?

In regards to windows files being quarantined, they were automatically replaced by windows which is why they cannot be restored. They already were. That's how windows works.

As for 3rd party apps, a simple reinstall/repair would fix them.

As for those that lost personal data etc, why did you fail to make backups if they were that important to begin with?

Well to delete files when they are found, just go to custom settings!!

Thanks Razer.

That setting is never the best one to use.

You should always try & get it disinfected first to try & avoid reinstalls etc.