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

I request you to read my post carefully. I did not say that there are legal grounds for this. Backup or no backup there has been a mistake from Bitdefender and expect people to have moral responsibility at least. I also acknowledge that this is a human error and it could happen to any software or product but it should not be made an excuse to not respond to the customer panic. Do you mean to say that Bitdefender can get away from after sales service by saying , 'You do not have a backup, therefore we won't help you even though our product has made your Windows unusable?'. You may not be able to take legal action against Bitdefender for malfunctioning but surely there should be some law in place so that one can take action against shoddy service especially in a crisis as important as this.

Let us take a scenario, I had forced my friend to install Bitdefender, luckily she had a 32 bit Vista. She takes online tuition and most of her students are attending exams and if she has missed a session with them it would have been a huge blow to her credibility and also to her students scores. What sort of backup would you expect her to have? It is not only about money. This goes beyond that.

I know that Bitdefender team, though late, has acknowledged this and has promised action. I was in particular responding to L.o.D posts. They say that he is not an insider but it is as if he speaks on their behalf. I was just requesting the team to control this guy because he is doing more damage than the bug itself.

Actually I wasn't just including you in any reference to legal recourse. There seems to be some sort of general assumption that BitDefender should financially recompense customers who have lost data, or, just for the inconvenience. I imagine BitDefender will come up with something, and it might be some form of license extension, but even that loses the company revenue, and the world economic climate being what it is, money lost ain't good when you're trying to keep a company going, and, in this instance, have what I guess is an R&D team keeping up with viruses.

The details of your scenario do not matter. If I lose my machine due to catastrophic disk failure (which has happened more than once), then I need to have some contingency, which I do. More than that, if I run a business, and my PC is an essential tool in running that business, then *I* have a responsibility to ensure that I can carry on if the PC self destructs. This may sounds hard-nosed, but it's the way of the world. The problem is that people never heed advice until it's too late. Let's just hope that people might have learned that their PC is not guaranteed to be available 24/7 forever. Power supplies fail, disk drives fail, RAM fails, graphics cards fail, motherboard etc. It's all part of the mix.

And, believe me, I'm not saying BitDefender are free from blame, and you can be ###### sure someone is getting severely spanked over this. But I feel confident that BitDefender will take a long hard look at themselves after this, and see how this can be avoided again, how their QA processes can be improved, and, equally importantly, learn how to respond to totally unforeseen problems on a large-scale. The latter, particularly, has been poor. There is no mechanism for 'in your face' service status information. If I go to the BitDefender website, I get a large (and out of date!) advert for Mother's Day splashed across the top of the screen. That's where I want to see a service status, not some small hyperlink I have to go looking for on the page.

I 'forgive' them all this, but do so in the knowledge(?) that they cannot/would not let anything like this happen again. If they let me down, then it will be time for me to wave goodbye.

Kieran

After using bit defender for many years and recommending it to every person that brought their computer to me to fix I have become very disappointed in the quality of this AV program. This latest version seems to randomly crash and require a restart to get it working again every once in a while. Back in the early 90's I was a huge Nortons fan until they got bloated and resource hungry with useless junk addons and sub par AV protection. After that I moved on to McAfee and they ended up going down the same road, I love a simple AV program that just works all the time and a few years ago you have just that. This company has to me shown themselves to be an excellent team but seem to be losing sight of what the people want from them. We want solid AV protection that we can count on, I praise you every time one is caught trying to slip between windows cracks.

As for compensation I would like you to once again offer a simple and effective AV program that just works, you guys had it right but then you meddled with your recipe and upset alot of people. I am a very experienced with repairing computers so it wasn't hard to get back up and running just frustrating to have to fix everything and reinstalling all the programs effected. An extended license would keep me some what content but what would make me happy is if you would release slim down versions of your AV software. Seriously all of us that have a brain either have automatic updates on or know to check regularly and we know that 1234 is a crap password, we don't need some AV program telling us this. I don't need to encrypt IM chats on my home PC I don't need help managing my network and I think I can control my own identity lol.

I hope you guys have seen the light we all make mistakes and that's how we learn I have a business myself and I will tell you like I tell all my guys. You get one mistake excused and this was your one now learn from it and don't do it again.

Thank you for your years of protection and I hope many more to come.

BD is rated number 1-2 because it has all these easy to use features, I know my Total security has options to display easy/medium/expert user interface, and I like all the features it has, but I also see where your coming from and having a "light version" with no bells and whistles would be fine for some, but I dont think they would make any money doing that as not many would buy it imo.

BD comes with options to disable alot of the features anyways, I disable what i dont want running, simple and effective.

I also will be continuing with BD, as mistakes like this only better a company, allthough if something like this happened again I would seriously question the company. Who knows anyways, it could have been an employee trying to sabotage BD... who knows.

I did not lose anything myself, and also learnt the hard way through HD failure to keep regular backups of your computer. When my HD died, the company that made it did not give me a free one, or refund of data loss, instead they told me I should keep backups of all files... So i do now, but not on there HD's lol.

I did have them backed up, on a drive, which was hooked to my computer at the time, which was also deleted by BitDeleter.

And about your first question.

It would have cost them 420$ to do my computer, they told me it was 200$ to do it, and I needed the disk (Which I had to buy)

I LoL'd when you said this, sorry but having a backup external connection kept live on your PC? So if you get Malware, like BD just did to people, you get your backup HD infected as well, do you see where this is going?

Backup yes, is great, keeping a live connection to your backup HD is a bad idea, I keep my external backups disconnected to any live PC, that way they dont get infected if an issue should arise.

Your a funny person lol.

Like when you watch "The Ring" and then you hear a phone ringing.

No, like when you see a BitDefender update being downloaded

The Register has picked this up, and there is an official BitDefender apology in one of the comments on the article:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/22/bi...r_dodgy_update/

Kieran

I would like people to own up when they commit a mistake. It is good that the team has acted even if they were late. I am keeping a close eye on the forums for the next few days. Then I will decide whether to continue using Bitdefender or not. I still trust the product and expect it to get better but I am not too sure about its after sales service. If i decide to uninstal Bitdefender, then it won't be because of the Trojan-FakeAlert-5 problem but because of the lack of sympathy the team has shown towards it own customers.

BD employees have been on the forum 24/7 from the moment the patch was released and before that, trying to keep users up to date with what was going on. I have seen them answering to almost all inquiries. You can see their posts marked with "Technical Support" especially /index.php?/topic/18759-bad-update-or-solution-here-httpforumbitdefendercomindexphpshowtopic18789/" rel="">here

Sure, it took about 3.5 hours to rollback the murderous update, but I'm not sure we can say they just stayed on the fence watching.

When this 1st hit me I googled and found that lots of people were having the same problem. I found the thread here dealing with it then I had to scan through all the comments (which were bascially all the same) to find instructions from the tech guys. Found the intructions, followed them, waited for the patch, installed the patch and everything was fine!

Bitdefender is a great product and I think most of the problems (or lack of finding a solution) was due to the countless postings of the same issue so most of you only have yourselves to blame for not taking action sooner. Continuing to rant is not really a solution if the rant has already been made and all this does is bury the solution.

Anyway, as for compensation, extending the licence or a free renewal would be a great start and perhaps some Amazon vouchers?

Gary

BD employees have been on the forum 24/7 from the moment the patch was released and before that, trying to keep users up to date with what was going on. I have seen them answering to almost all inquiries. You can see their posts marked with "Technical Support" especially /index.php?/topic/18759-bad-update-or-solution-here-httpforumbitdefendercomindexphpshowtopic18789/" rel="">here

Sure, it took about 3.5 hours to rollback the murderous update, but I'm not sure we can say they just stayed on the fence watching.

Are L.o.D., Bloke etc Bdefender Employees ?

If so why just dont say so.........

Some new articles about the problem

http://www.zdnetasia.com/bad-security-upda...m?tag=mncol;txt

http://www.pcworld.com/article/192000/bad_...indows_pcs.html

Look at the comments on the bottom of the articles looks like bitdefender has lots of time to get on news website to do PR for the company. I just want them to answer my email to get my refund so i can buy another program.

There's a LOT of help from them in my thread that kept getting buried of threats of lawsuits & griping & flamefests.

AS for this, people should not be posting they need help in this forum, this is for trying to get compensation from Bitdefender which its has been two days and they still have not offered any kind of refund.

I had to have my Windows Vista 64 re-installed after trying to reboot in both last known good mode and safe mode (with & without networking) which was the telephone advice. Once they drew a blank (literally - no icons or menu bars at all!) on that I was told it would have to be elevated to the next level and I would be contacted - they took my telephone number. Of course in the next 24 hours I received nothing except a generic reply to my original email before the telephone calls (the first one cut me off after 13 minutes!) which was as useful as a chocolate teapot.

So in the end as I had to have the computer working I got a professional in to re-install WIndows at a cost of £250.00, plus all the additional aggravation of setting up all the little tweaks that I've done over the past year. Also annoying are things like bookmarks on my Safari browser are gone.

So all in all very annoying, a waste of two days, lots of initial worry and a lot of tweaking to get all my preferences back again. Luckily I also have a linux netbook when this happened or would not have been able to get onto the web to find out what was going on at all as this was my only internet enabled desktop computer!

So 48 hours later and no reply from BD - pretty poor show.

I don't do **** or dodgy torrent sites and the anti-virus was there as a failsafe, and how ironic that it was that what killed my computer!

Finally, a quick question. Is it now safe to run live update? I don't want to go through all that again!

Actually I wasn't just including you in any reference to legal recourse. There seems to be some sort of general assumption that BitDefender should financially recompense customers who have lost data, or, just for the inconvenience. I imagine BitDefender will come up with something, and it might be some form of license extension, but even that loses the company revenue, and the world economic climate being what it is, money lost ain't good when you're trying to keep a company going, and, in this instance, have what I guess is an R&D team keeping up with viruses.

The details of your scenario do not matter. If I lose my machine due to catastrophic disk failure (which has happened more than once), then I need to have some contingency, which I do. More than that, if I run a business, and my PC is an essential tool in running that business, then *I* have a responsibility to ensure that I can carry on if the PC self destructs. This may sounds hard-nosed, but it's the way of the world. The problem is that people never heed advice until it's too late. Let's just hope that people might have learned that their PC is not guaranteed to be available 24/7 forever. Power supplies fail, disk drives fail, RAM fails, graphics cards fail, motherboard etc. It's all part of the mix.

This is way different.

Lets put this in another context. You employ a bank to keep your money safe, you would then state that: If a robber comes steal your money or that the bank would be destroyed by an earthquake then ###### happens and your money would be lost and you could not get compensation.

I can buy that in terms computer security systems, despite that for any other company providing a safe keeping service they would be responsible should it fail. But still i can agree to those terms.

But that is not what happened here, let me explain

You employ a bank to keep your money safe. In front of your eyes your bank takes all your money and burn them. There is no doubt it was your bank doing this, in fact they openly admit it.

You mean to say it's still not their responsibility - that in fact its yours? You where stupid enough to trust the company and that your stuff where safe. A company that "Protects against viruses and other malware with industry-leading technology." Just did the exact opposite and they are still not responsible for it?

I don't really have to elaborate on this right? Its just gotta be pretty ###### obvious for anyone.

They are to blame, but was the direct damage so great?

BD didn't actually delete anything, unless you set the action instead of "move to quarantine" to "delete".

In default mode, all it did was lock files in quarantine. System files, as well. The greatest mistake was restarting the computer with those files still locked. This is the point where mayhem broke loose.

This is just a matter of lack of knowledge concerning how an antivirus works and how an operating system works.

Because had anyone known those were critical files in quarantine, they probably wouldn't have restarted the computer.

My opinion.

@L.o.D

Yep i would. It would be a difference if this was a virus that somehow escaped the system, or if it was a crash unrelated to bit defender where bit defender supposedly would have helped. This is a case of the company destroying your files - nothing else. They will and should reimburse every single thing that they have destroyed(i.e. where it is clear that the customer have followed standard procedure dealing with what was perceived as a virus or following the instructions of the support)

@midnight

http://forum.bitdefender.com/index.php?sho...amp;#entry81567

Check out my post. This is not the case of ignorance. Most people who got alot destroyed by bitdefender was not ignorant, nor did not take advice from staff or followed their general procedures.

I believe there are a lot of pretty obvious cases here.

Unfortunately as I was unable to boot my computer I had no means of knowing where or how the problem originated from.

I had to install everything from scratch because BitDefender quarantined 18812 files from windows and programs.

I have lost two working days formatting hard drive and reinstalling my programmes to get back to where I was.

Luckily I have all my files on another disk, so I didn't lose them with the format, but having to install the OS and every single program is very time consuming.

I am most disappointed with this situation and I certainly won’t be using Bit Defender again as I have lost trust in the company.

Ya a clean install which leads to countless hours doing things other than making money or real things that you should be doing over this MISTAKE. Not only that but lost time peeps needed to be on their comps for business/school or whatever might be the case. This should have been VERY easily recognizable had they tested it themselves hence therein lies the problem.

First, there is no reason why it should take countless hours to reinstall windows & all 3rd party apps again.

Secondly, if you use that same PC for work/school, you should have a secure backup kept elsewhere.

Ya a clean install which leads to countless hours doing things other than making money or real things that you should be doing over this MISTAKE. Not only that but lost time peeps needed to be on their comps for business/school or whatever might be the case. This should have been VERY easily recognizable had they tested it themselves hence therein lies the problem.

Just to let you know I think LOD is a paid up patsy for damage control by Bit-Defender. He made a fool of himself in the "Bad update or?" thread he started. Users were actually asking him to be kicked out of the thread. Go and check that thread if you don't believe me. He was made many users angry and he also contradicted himself saying he was not blaming users then flaming some guy using "YOUR" problem in capitals. This is all borne out in the thread; he can say what he likes, but read for yourself with the search function LOD.

His modus operandi appears to be to

1 Diminish impact of data loss

2 Blame users in some way or another

3 Ignore time wasted issues. Time = Money

4 Focus the problem on Quarantine deletion check box issue. Ignoring other possible avenues of data loss.

5 Try to diminish the culpability of Bitdefender. No "type testing" of patch by system vendor = epic fail, no way around that sorry.

5 He sometimes flames inexperienced users. Again check the "Bad Update" thread.

Don't waste your time with this guy, he's here to *waste your time*.

Again this L.o.Da is assuming things sitting in his AC room. This whole fiasco happened just because of BD team's negligence. It would have been different if a virus sneaked through and destroyed all the data or a hard disk crash caused it. What backup do you have for time loss? Can't you read or understand simple things? Just learn to read properly before advising people.

at L.o.D direct your questions to a particular user. Are you asking me? Enabling which settings?

Where in my post did I say that newbies set their BD to auto delete? And do not assume that newbies don't change settings. All of us have done that. Why are you assuming things sitting before your computer? Newbie, intermediate or advanced BD made people suffer and not all of them lost data.

I have set my sytem to quarantine files and I am not a newbie. All my applications were getting quarantined and i Couldn't do anything with my sytem. The same thing happened with my friend, all his apps got quarantined and he couldn't use his webcam or his streaming app. Setting BD or any other AV app to auto delete is not a good idea but that is not the reason for this disaster. Backups and altering settings are different issues altogether. Keep it separate from this issue.

It would have been a lot better if you had advised people to be careful in the future but what you did and are still doing is ridiculing people or forcing the blame for this issue at least partly on them. All i asked was to treat people with respect instead of questioning them FBI style as if they were the cause of this fake alert. This is absolutely clear no matter how hard you try to get away, many people have been really angered by your responses. It is pretty clear and they have a reason. I do not blame you but i blame the BD team for allowing you to carry on with this nonsense.

pvp, newbies will use default settings. They won't go into advanced settings to change things when they have no idea what they do etc.

Having files go to quarantine is a default setting.

I questioned why people were changing that setting to delete & then you stated it was not the users responsibility when changing that setting, which is false.

There you go yet again trying to make it out that I blame the user for the BD screw up.

I NEVER SAID THAT EVER.

I only put responsibility on the user for changing any settings and the lack of backups for important data.

Why people would not do that if that data is so important is beyond me.

That does not mean that it takes away the responsibility from BD for this fiasco!

But you seem adamnant that it does when it was never stated by anyone.

L.o.D. are you an employee or affliated with BitDefender in any way? Beyond that of just using there software?

I feel things are getting a bit out of hand, we are blaming each other when the blame is firmly with Bit Defender.

For the record, I didn't have BD set to autodelete but when it came up with all those corrupt files and things stopped working I chose, rightly or wrongly to switch off. I then couldn't reboot, not even in safe mode. I had no other options than try a recovery, which still left the system unstable, then to format and reinstall.

I feel sorry for those of you who have had to call in professionals to do the task, I guess I am lucky in so far as I can do the job myself.

There are a lot of very unhappy people out there, including myself.

As I said before we bought Bit Defender to protect our computers......

@ L.o.D -> Why don't you understand that many people here have an issue with your style of responses? You always say something like 'I never said BD are not to blame' but by reading your posts I (and many others , I am sure) get the feeling that you are trying hard to save BD from this fiasco by blaming the user at least partly. You behave like a lawyer who is trying a damage limitation for his guilty client. That is what I told you to be a little benevolent, people are upset, very upset. It is good to advise them to keep their settings safe and have a backup but you should keep it separate from this fake alert issue. You are mixing the two and making the environment even more chaotic.

@BitDefender Staff

What now? What compensation schemes are in the works? People have given there ideas and now its your turn to throw the ball.

@ L.o.D -> ok. Let the decision process of the BD team take over. Hope everyone will get a fair deal.

BD

Why are you directing folks from other posts about compensation to this one when there is no information about it here? Will you be posting information about compensation here?

@Darius20: We are very sorry that you had to reinstall the operating system. In this moment our highest priority is to help everybody to get the computer up and running properly. Of course we are discussing about compensation - see Compensation For False-positive Of Trojan.fakealert.5? - but right now we cannot provide you with any specific information about this issue.

Thanks