It happened to me yesterday....

http://www.dslreport...Gone-Mad-105773

Antivirus program suddenly sees false positives everywhere...



While it veers astray from our normal subject matter of broadband-related news, users in our security forum are indicating that Avast antivirus appears to have gone seriously off of the rails. According to users, the application has suddenly decided to flag many safe applications, freshly-downloaded files and dlls as malicious, wreaking havoc on user systems.


It appears that the program is flagging a number of files used by entirely normal programs such as Skype, Spybot Search and Destroy and other programs incorrectly as the Win32elf-MZG trojan.

Avast's official forums are currently being crushed by the sudden onslaught of traffic created by confused users, many of whom are being told that generic program files are a security threat. Impacted users should uninstall the program or disable the file shield functionality of the application until a fix is issued, lest they delete necessary files on the advice of an anti-virus program gone mad. Avast, which just celebrated the addition of its 100,000,000th user, is in for a very busy night.

Needless to say, your copy of Microsoft Paint is not a virus, regardless of what Avast is currently telling you.

Update Avast has posted a statement to their forum saying they've fixed the problem.