Security News Webroot antivirus goes bananas, starts trashing Windows system files

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ForgottenSeer 58943

We do not need a proof link for this to have it confirmed. Many people have been exposed here to the trashtalking of webroot when it comes to defending their product. And that Daniel guy aka triple helix is the worst! He will terrorise you for negative replies towards the product. Or as one of the mods over their explained : some of our community members tend to be very protective towards our products. This is not healthy in my eyes. So that is the reason why I left the webroot community.

A few years ago I registered at another forum to report some serious issues with Webroot. One of those issues was, back then when SSD's were expensive I used smaller SSD drives for my OS/Boot drives and larger 7200RPM Data drives. Webroot was filling all of the drives up and I found almost 100GB of data hidden in WRDATA folder off of /programdata directory. Triple Helix attacked me, viciously and said I wasn't smart enough to 'understand' the product. He followed me around to each thread posting the same made up graphic about Webroots technology. A few days later I was banned and I noticed almost all of the critics or people pointing out flaws in Webroot were also banned.

As noted earlier, I worked with support for awhile on the WRDATA and a variety of other issues and they ended up telling me that actual pieces of malware were 'safe' because they don't ruin your system, then they closed my tickets. I opened additional tickets for other issues and those tickets went unresponded to for weeks. It's then I realized that this company and their product are probably just a sham. I did a little investigation back then into Triple Helix and found he had multiple fake accounts on a variety of forums and was involved in a very clever disinformation campaign against other AV products. Later I found he was on Webroots Payroll. As a result I ran a charge back on my CC against Webroot and never looked back.

I find people like Triple Helix disgusting little small minded worms that are probably responsible for most of the ills of humanity. I guarantee you Triple Helix spends half a day clicking on forums, copy and pasting that fake graphic and massaging the interface of Webroot repeatedly. These are the kind of people that probably followed around Hitler extorting his virtues on everyone and silencing critics.
 

Janl1992l

Level 14
Verified
Well-known
Feb 14, 2016
648
Wow, so much bashing about Webroot. I dont know and dont think it is needed that much. But well, i dont know i never used webroot. Like 2 years ago i installed it and instand uninstalled it. It just looked like some of the rough fake avs, lol. The look is just amateur. I always tought Comodo had the badest Mods etc on there forum but Webroot seems even worse, i dont know. (Comodo changed alot, the forum is realy nice atm and user friendly since the new admin is active there). :)
 

FrFc1908

Level 20
Verified
Top Poster
Well-known
Jul 28, 2016
950
Wow, so much bashing about Webroot. I dont know and dont think it is needed that much. But well, i dont know i never used webroot. Like 2 years ago i installed it and instand uninstalled it. It just looked like some of the rough fake avs, lol. The look is just amateur. I always tought Comodo had the badest Mods etc on there forum but Webroot seems even worse, i dont know. (Comodo changed alot, the forum is realy nice atm and user friendly since the new admin is active there). :)

The webroot community is NOT totally unfriendly , there are also some very friendly and helpful members there actually! the ( official ) webroot mods and staff are nice as well! on this community gold vips as they call them have the abbility / freedom to moderate as well and that is a big mistake. they have 3 gold vips 2 of them are nice and the 3rd one , Triple Helix does missuse his title and I did report his bad behaving to the moderators and they took appropreate action against him. it is a big shame that one person can destroy something beautiful for the rest. being a fan of a product is one thing and sharing your point of view on how the product in your eyes is good , but taking the freedom from all they naysayers to speak out their remarks is totally undemocratic and unacceptable. such people should be banned for life and their titles should be taken down. luckely for us other vendors do listen to comments the good aswell as the bad. I hope webroot will be smart enough to take the feedback seriously and look beyond the fanboy wissdom.
 

Winter Soldier

Level 25
Verified
Top Poster
Well-known
Feb 13, 2017
1,486
In my opinion, this thread is changing: the original topic was about the mess created by WSA, probably caused by poor technical implementation and subsequent severe lack of control. Now people here are doing an inquisition to this guy (Triple Helix). I do not know him, but I believe he does not really represent Webroot, at least at my eyes and you are giving too much importance to him when the real problem is the total unreliability of Webroot as money-driven company.
 

Petrovic

Level 64
Verified
Honorary Member
Top Poster
Well-known
Apr 25, 2013
5,354
UPDATE 4/28/17 2:11 p.m. MDT
As a reminder, the repair utility to address the false positive issue that arose on Monday, April 24, is available. The utility will release and restore quarantined applications to working order on the affected endpoints.

Please note, the utility was built to address only this specific false positive issue. It will be deactivated in the future.

If applications are operating normally on your systems, you do not need to implement the utility.

To obtain the repair utility, open a support ticket, or reply to your existing support ticket related to this issue. Please include your phone number in the ticket.

I want to thank each of our customers and partners for their patience during this time, and we are committed to earning your trust going forward.
Webroot Service Announcement
 

ExploitBlocker10

Level 1
Verified
Sep 4, 2015
40
So, you have nothing to say....
trolling for news on Webroot
fact is Webroot released a minor signature update that paralyzed a lot of people's computers not to mention all the buisness clients. If a antivirus company can't release a simple signature update without it going berserk then I'm not sure they should be making antivirus, the industry itself has a bad enough reputation already without Webroot wrecking clients systems, they've only added fuel to that fire.
Ignore the poor grammer and punctuation I'm 2 years old :p
 

Game Of Thrones

Level 5
Verified
Well-known
Jun 5, 2014
220
I noticed they were quick to point out that they didn't get hacked/compromised. I wonder if it will be discovered that some foul play was involved? Maybe a rogue employee, whatever.. I'm not saying that it is the case here, just speculating... .
well anyone knows me knows that i was a webroot fanboy too, i even wrote an article in one of the most used internet forums in my country about how it works! i was one of the first that used secureanywhere when it launched, but now i'm disappointed not just because of this incident which can happen to any company but for low detection rate, one of the worst self defense of the program itself in the industry, really bad logic in dealing with new malwares and so on(i can write an article about this too!). in that days i thought that other companys are done! and webroot will do great with its new way of dealing with malwares and so on...!! . but then i saw other vendors(i did not had a professional research on how others operate) but after doing that i found that vendors like trend micro kaspersky symantec and so on which have a big playground in business and corporate section do better in many aspects and you are really more protected with them than having just webroot installed. i did not want to write this since i'm done with webroot and did not wanted to say negative about a product that can be really good if they want and work harder and listen to people but i saw your professional and logical writing so i decided to write this and just for info trend micro enabled machine learning in home products too in v12 beta. i can write more about webroot but its of topic and out of respect that i have for this company.
 

woodrowbone

Level 10
Verified
Dec 24, 2011
480
When Joe quit Webroot it went downhill fast, Joe understod constructive criticism.
He made something with it, he made WSA better with the suggestions he received at Wilders forum.
This thread is full of views on what is going on both at Wilders and Webroots forum these days, no smoke without fire...

/W
 
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ForgottenSeer 58943

When Joe quit Webroot it went downhill fast, Joe understod constructive criticism.
He made something with it, he made WSA better with the suggestions he received at Wilders forum.
This thread is full of views on what is going on both at Wilders and Webroots forum these days, no smoke without fire...

/W

I didn't know Joe left Webroot. Now this makes more sense.

Chris Buechler left PfSense for Ubiquiti and is now designing a next generation UTM for Ubiquiti. PfSense has started a slow, steady decline. Mikko started to make F-Prot really good but then left for F-Secure, now look at F-Prot. Raimond Genes of Trend Micro died recently (and suddenly), he was largely responsible for the reinvention of Trend as one of the top antivirus products. Machine Learning appearing in the consumer versions was one of the last things he did. Let's hope Trend doesn't decline as a result of the loss of his direction.

What's going on at Wilders? I haven't been over there in a couple of years after I was ran off by the Webroot Kool-Aid Kids over there that took great offense at my asking questions and pointing out problems with it.
 

mlnevese

Level 26
Verified
Top Poster
Well-known
May 3, 2015
1,531
To be fair, privacy paranoids are present on every security forum... It's a matter of finding the forums where they have not taken over and not every update to every software ever written is seem as a threat to privacy, identity, the universe and everything :)
 

roger_m

Level 41
Verified
Top Poster
Content Creator
Dec 4, 2014
3,014
they ended up telling me that actual pieces of malware were 'safe' because they don't ruin your system
So they were malware rather than being unwanted programs or toolbars for example?

I just had a quick look at some old posts at Wilders, and if you look at this post and a few of the replies, it shows just how arrogant Triple Helix is, which certainly does not reflect well on Webroot.

I've got nothing bad to say about WSA from my limited use of it, other than I don't like that it always needs to do another scan after detecting anything. WSA has given me some issues at times when I've tried it, but when it has, I've just moved onto another security application. Once when I had some problems I was asked at Wilders to send some logs, so they could look at what was going on. I sent the logs, but it seems they never even looked at them.
 

FrFc1908

Level 20
Verified
Top Poster
Well-known
Jul 28, 2016
950
So they were malware rather than being unwanted programs or toolbars for example?

I just had a quick look at some old posts at Wilders, and if you look at this post and a few of the replies, it shows just how arrogant Triple Helix is, which certainly does not reflect well on Webroot.

I've got nothing bad to say about WSA from my limited use of it, other than I don't like that it always needs to do another scan after detecting anything. WSA has given me some issues at times when I've tried it, but when it has, I've just moved onto another security application. Once when I had some problems I was asked at Wilders to send some logs, so they could look at what was going on. I sent the logs, but it seems they never even looked at them.

jeez I have been looking through his remarks.......man oh man....TH really does think of himself being god with a bulletproof vest. no wonder he got banned here. when will he be on wilders? he is certainly bad news for webroot PR!
 
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ForgottenSeer 58943

Wilders is taken over by Privacy Paranoids and FUD dealers, become hard to talk about Windows or MS without those guys jumping in and start spreading nonsense.

So true...

Anyone remember Wilders from 10-15 years ago? It was a nice place, with nice people and a lot of AV vendors used that as their support forum (ESET, PrevX, etc) But somehow, over time a bunch of privacy paranoids and fudders came in and setup shop. Paul Wilders used to aggressively moderate it to keep them at bay but after he went off to do other things... Well.. I think Wilders has very little credibility anymore and it seems like the AV vendors and reps have abandoned it (mostly) because all they do is end up putting out fires there. Sad, that forum used to be great.

Triple Helix has done immense damage to Webroot. I'm not understanding why Webroot hasn't realized this and cut him loose. Its guys like him that damage a firms reputation because it gives the impression a firm is paying shills like him to go around and disrupt. If Webroot needs a community manager then hire one. But stop paying shills to go around stirring up trouble. You can find Triple Helix under assumed names on a variety of forums talking down other security products. He's been banned from most.
 

russ0408

Level 5
Verified
Well-known
Jul 28, 2013
234
I only go over to Wilder's to follow Dan, the developer of VoodooShield. The odd time I will look to see if there is another page added to the Webroot post, because I know there is fireworks. I go in there just to read the arguments between Triple Helix and the Wilder's members that post the failures of Webroot( which I must say there seems to more and more all the time). If Webroot were paying Triple Helix per battle in Wilder's he'd be a millionaire. In his eyes Webroot can do no wrong.
 

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