Can antivirus software cause data file corruption?

[ScotH]

Last week we had a bad situation where our files on our NetWare 5.1 server were found to be corrupt. Users opening Word files, for example, would find them either empty or containing garbage characters. No hardware problems were found, and no viruses were detected. The problem happened on Monday, and on the prior Friday, I had updated InoculateIT with the latest virus signature and engine files. I had heard that the antivirus engine file could cause the problem we experienced. Has anyone heard of this sort of thing happening?

 

[Luckyfour]

Well, Symantec has discussed corrupt files:
"Corrupted Livetri.zip file
It is possible that the list of updates, which is stored in the Livetri.zip file, has become corrupted. To correct this, delete Livetri.zip, and then run LiveUpdate again. Please follow these steps:"
And
when McAfee changed an engine there were huge problems (I had them and switched to Norton)

 

[Guest_imported]

I had this problem 2 days ago turned out to be the w32.weird you would have to detect it in nav because w32.weird corrups most exe's

 

[ScotH]

I looked at a description of the w32.weird virus, and it doesn't seem to cause the corruption problems we were encountering. Instead it opens up a backdoor to a remote user.

 

[ChrisHirst]

Yes there can be problems caused by some combinations of scanner engine and dat files as LuckyFour says. The McAfee problem was actually the other way round (a new DAT with an old (retired) scan engine) and only affected NTFS drives. What you could be getting is the scanner detecting what appears to be malicious code\macros and removing it. If Innoculate has any kind of heuristic detection disable this and see if that effects a fix.

Chris