Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from Macworld UK. Visit Macworld UK’s blog page for the latest Mac news from across the Atlantic.
Users of F-Secure’s Mac Protection Technology Preview security offering have reported a bug that caused clean files to be sent to the trash bin.
Anyone running the software should check the contents of their trash bin carefully for files they haven’t manually deleted themselves, the company said.
F-Secure has also released a tool for affected users to help them restore lost files. Users should be careful not to empty their trash bins before running the tool, the company said.
“Due to a broken anti-virus database update, F-Secure Mac Protection Technology Preview produced several false positive alerts for our beta testers. While real-time scanning affected mostly Safari, Firefox and Chrome files, running a manual scan caused several other clean files to be detected as malicious. This broken update caused several files to be erroneously sent to the trash bin,” the company said in a statement.
F-Secure’s Mikko Hypponen apologised in a blog for the problem. “Obviously this is not nice. We’d like to apologise to anyone affected by this error of ours,” he said, emphasising that users of the Windows and Linux versions of the product were unaffected.
The tool can be downloaded from F-Secure’s Website.
The Mac Protection Technology Preview is a beta product not on general release and the company “strongly recommends using this Technology Preview only for testing purposes”.