Similarly to mima85, we are a software company with a lot of customers and all our applications use Chilkat libraries extensively. So those of our customers using avast! had their systems totally screwed up by this problem yesterday.
I realize the latest definitions update has fixed this false positive (and reasonably quickly), but that was unfortunately too little, too late for many of our customers – whose businesses were severely disrupted by this – and it won't undo the damage to our own reputation.
What I don't understand, and would like to see an explanation for, is how could this happen in the first place? Chilkat's libraries are all digitally signed and they're a reputable company that's been around for years. Moreover, these files were all registered in Windows as either COM or .NET components, so they were almost certainly going to be integral to the proper running of an application users had installed on their systems. Don't avast! have some mechanism to check that the files they're blanket flagging as malware actually are? You know, like researching first to find out whether an infected file has a genuine counterpart that is safe before issuing a blanket flag? I understand someone may have used the Chilkat name to disguise their malware, but surely it wouldn't be that difficult to differentiate between genuine files and fake ones if the genuine files were known about?
Oh and this whole thing might not have been so bad if there was a relatively straightforward way to tell the avast! program it had made a mistake and to restore the incorrectly removed files to their proper locations. If that was the case we could have fired out a quick email to all of our customers, instructing them on how to resolve the problem. But the only way we could find to fix this was to manually add exclusions and then copy the files back in; and as this involved a few files in different locations (that varied depending on the OS) that was too much of a task to try and instruct our customers how to do for themselves. So we've had to spend a day and a half supporting our customers remotely after this debacle!
This is not good enough avast!, simply not good enough!