Anti-virus Misdiagnosis Can Hurt Legitimate Businesses

False positives are not only potentially more annoying or damaging to computers than the viruses themselves, but they can also put a dent in the profits of legitimate businesses. The sales of a popular UK online florist shop dropped 50% after electronic communications security giant MessageLabs wrongfully tagged their marketing e-mail as being infected.

MessageLabs offers a wide array of content filtering services for e-mail, instant messaging and web traffic. In addition, they offer anti-virus, anti-spyware and data encryption solutions. The company, recently acquired by Symantec in a $700 million deal, has a strong customer base in the United Kingdom.

It seems understandable that people at Arena Flowers, an online florist business based in London, would be upset when the subscribers of the company's newsletter start calling the office to complain about the fact that the MessageLabs security software protecting their computer advises them of viruses being distributed through the Arena marketing e-mails.

"The MessageLabs Email Security System discovered a possible virus or unauthorised code (such as a Trojan) in an email sent to you," read the alert received by the users, identifying the threat as MalWare '˜Exploit/Phishing-paypal-1054. "It was a complete, 100% misdiagnosis by MessageLabs, as they subsequently confirmed," writes Will Wynne, Arena Flowers' director, on the company's blog.

"We learnt that the reason that our email got hammered is that we put the word 'PayPal' into the subject line yet we are not PayPal. Blimey. Sophisticated stuff," Wynne ironically refers to MessageLabs' detection techniques. He also explains that "PayPal" was part of the e-mail subject in order to "let our customers know that they could win £10k cash if they paid for any order with PayPal during PayPal's very generous 10th birthday promotion."

Mr. Wynne says that in the process of sorting this problem out with MessageLabs, he was proposed to acquire their software on at least two occasions. Even though the company estimates that their sales for the month have been cut in half due to this incident and that customer trust in their services has been clearly affected, it decided not to pursue litigation. "They didn't do it on purpose but it certainly hurt," writes Wynne.

Clearly, MessageLabs are not the first to falsely tag files or e-mails as being malicious and they most likely won't be the last either. Just recently, AVG scored an amazing three significant false positives in a single month due to bogus definition files, one of which rendered systems unbootable. However, AVG did award a free one-year license upgrade to all affected customers. Maybe it would be nice of MessageLabs to at least use Arena's services and send a bouquet of flowers along with an apology note to all of their misinformed UK customers.