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Sometimes in our effort to save steps, we figure well just set our antivirus programs and anti-spyware programs to delete the files. After all, why do need to keep the virus or spend the time hunting for it in a quarantine folder? Simply stated, mistakes happen.

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes an antivirus company will release a signature file that is inaccurate. When the AV program performs the next virus scan, good files can be marked as having viruses. This is known as a "false positive". It can be disastrous if the file belonged to another program or was part of your operating system. Soon after, your machine starts to misbehave.

The problem also catches us off guard as we have this perception that the antivirus companies never make these types of mistakes. As a result, we don't suspect the program is the source of our problems. Hate to break it to you, but no software company is perfect.

One way to safeguard your files is to configure your antivirus software and anti-spyware so they don't automatically delete flagged files. Instead, have the program place these files in a quarantine folder and alert you. This way if you spot a common program such as excel.exe in your quarantine folder you can stop and question why. Conversely, if you start your Excel program and get an error about a missing file, you ll think about checking your quarantine folder.

The latest incident involved McAfee who quickly issued a corrected file. If you were impacted by the bad file (DAT 4715), you may find these links useful:

McAfee Tools for Recovering Files from DAT 4715
Using the McAfee Managed VirusScan Quarantine Viewer