Thursday, September 3, 2009

Symantec’s “Suspicious.Cloud” Detection

Symantec’s antivirus products contain an highly sensitive detection technology designed to detect entirely new malware threats without traditional signatures. This technology is aimed at detecting malicious software that has been intentionally mutated or morphed by attackers.

If one or more files on your computer have been classified as having a Suspicious.Cloud threat, this indicates that the files have suspicious characteristics and therefore might contain a new or unknown threat. However, given the sensitive nature of this detection technology, it may occasionally identify non-malicious, legitimate software programs (FALSE POSITIVES) that also share these behavioral characteristics. Therefore, it is recommended that users manually check all files detected as Suspicious.Cloud by Symantec antivirus products for potential misidentification, and submit any suspect files to Symantec Security Response for further analysis (refer the below link for Virus Submission to Symantec*).

In rare cases where a legitimate file has been misidentified and subsequently quarantined, your computer may behave abnormally or you may find that one or more applications no longer function as expected. In such rare situations, you should open the Quarantine in your Symantec antivirus product. From here, you may review the list of all files detected as Suspicious.Cloud and, if you identify a potential misidentification, restore the file from quarantine and allow it to run normally.

*Symantec Virus Submission

Original Source:

Symantec Security Response