The webroot antivirus removes files from windows and classifies the operating system as “malware”

Users of the Webroot security product were unlucky this week when the program started to classify legitimate Windows files as "malicious" files.

Although the company released a tutorial on how to correct the problem, many users still encountered difficulties in recovering the deleted files and returning the operating system to a functional state.

Webroot, an antivirus that sees Windows as "malware" and Facebook as a "phishing" portal

The problem is known in the antivirus industry as a “ false positive ”, a case in which a legitimate file is classified as malicious and therefore becomes completely blocked or deleted from the operating system.

False positive incidents don't usually have much of an impact, although sometimes a legitimate app might stop working. But in the case of Webroot, the entire operating system was affected considering that the application began to consider that the system files were malware.

The incorrect detection by Webroot in Windows lasted two hours and as a result a large percentage of Windows files were mistaken for W32.Trojan.Gen Trojan.

For now, Webroot has provided a solution in their community forum whereby users will need to log in to the Webroot online console and manually create rules that will quarantine or delete all files erroneously tagged as Trojans.

Even so, the company is preparing a universal solution for both corporate clients and private users, since not everyone is allowed to fix it manually, and even less when it comes to companies with dozens of servers.

If your system is affected by this failure, you could try to uninstall Webroot and restore the quarantined files using a Windows rescue disk, and then reinstall the antivirus again. According to Webroot, this could solve the problem.