A friend of mine sent me an email after reading this morning’s post asking the following question:

I once scanned a computer that had Panda installed on it with Avast and
Avast seemed to think that some of Panda’s files were dangerous. I
showed this to …[a friend]… and she told me that quite often, anti-virus programs
will lock onto other anti-virus programs as if they are harmful. I’m
supposing that this is probably because of the way that anti-virus
programs have to delve into your computer.
You said above that that Mcafee has a tendency to actually bug your
computer. I wonder if that has anything to do with that?

I sent back the following reply:

Avast can find other anti-virus system’s harmful. Generally the viruses I
was speaking of were found within the system32 directory in windows and
also in system backups as well as on system restore partitions. Not so
much inside the program files folder. These were some nasty bugs which had
been previously missed.

Mcafee is just so incompetent of a virus scan program that I joke it comes
with viruses pre-installed. I am not sure I made it clear that that was a
joke, but the end result I’m looking for should be the same. Mcafee needs
to go. I could list several situations in which Norton and Mcafee allowed
a virus to exist which was later removed by Avast without harming the
system. Some of them were fatal to all the surrounding computers as well.
It was some pretty nasty stuff!

God Bless,
-Dan

Maybe this information will help to clarify this morning’s post a little more. On a further note, anti-virus software like avast finds other anti-virus software harmful because these programs need to store the viruses on the system so they know how to spot them. That is what virus definitions are. It works a little bit like a vaccine in that these are not the real thing but instead just a bit of code so that the anti-virus program knows how to spot the viruses. The down side is that anti-virus software will catch the definitions in other anti-virus software packages. This is why you should only run one anti-virus at any given time.

Hope that helps!

God Bless,
-Daniel Kolansky