It’s unclear how so many legitimate Windows files and one of the world’s best-known websites were flagged in a huge false positive fracas, but that’s the situation that many thousands of Webroot found themselves in yesterday.
Antivirus vendor Webroot had a rather large meltdown yesterday when they issued a bad update. That update is causing a lot of trouble for customers. The bad signature update just flagged as malicious hundreds of benign files needed to run Microsoft Windows, as well as apps that run on top of the operating system.
Other users reported that their social network favorite – Facebook – was being flagged as a phishing site.
Webroot social media advisors were referring angry customers to their community pages with their shortened link: https://wbrt.io/lj2x
Webroot has yet to provide a definitive fix, but so far at least one user has reported that uninstalling Webroot, restoring quarantined files from a backup drive, and then reinstalling Webroot seems to fix the problem. Of course, that assumes you have a backup.