[James (Jim) Hillier]

If you are running Avast 6 and are currently finding your favourite/usual sites are being flagged as malware do not worry. This has been caused by a severe fault with the latest definitions update from Avast, which is obviously creating a heap of false positives.

When I got on the computer this morning and started going through my usual procedures I couldn't connect to many sites and it seemed Avast was flagging every site I visited as malware. It even flagged several of the site advisory services included in the Firefox extension LinkExtend as malware.

So I disabled Avast's Web Shield component and then Googled this issue; it seems there are thousands affected.

Here is a temporary workaround until Avast fix the problem permanently:

Right click on the Avast icon in the notification area of the taskbar and select Open avast! user interface.
Click on Real Time Shields [in the left hand navigation panel].
Click on Web Shield and disable the option to Scan web (HTTP) Traffic:

[marko]

WOW, that's not good Jimbo, just shows even the big guys can hit problems from time to time

[James (Jim) Hillier]

Yep, must be something pretty generic [common to most web sites] to throw up so many false positives Marko.

As you can imagine, it has caused plenty of panic.