F-Secure apologises for trashing clean Mac OS X files

FINNISH INSECURITY FIRM F-Secure has issued a public apology after its consumer-facing Mac software decided to delete files which weren't actually infected with malware.

The "serious false alarm" hit the beta version of the firm's Mac OS X software F-Secure Mac Protection, said F-Secure chief research officer Mikko Hypponen in a blog post.

An update in its database caused several false alarms, which saw users' clean files sent to the trash. On the F-Secure forums, users said that their web browsers suddenly started fighting with F-Secure's security software, causing functions to fail.

An angry forum member said, "This is a major blow to F-Secure reputation. What could be worse than a supposed virus protection program actually destroying and messing everything by itself?. Not much use for that type of 'protection'."

Affected users found that they could not solve the problems by restoring their trashed files, but fortunately for users, F-Secure has made a tool available that should be able to do this.

However this comes too late for some users who had to do a full re-install to get their systems working again, or those who had deleted files from the trash.

Hyponnen said in his typical straightforward Scandinavian way, "Obviously this is not nice. We'd like to apologise to anyone affected by this error of ours." µ