The Antivirus vendor, BitDefender, recently released a damaged update that marks legitimate Windows and BitDefender files as malicious. BitDefender will then quarantine these files identifying them as “Trojan.FakeAlert.5” resulting in Windows becoming un-bootable.

This faulty update only effects the 64-bit versions of Windows and furthermore the update had to occur between 8am and 11:30am on the March 20th

The company has released a press release containing fixes for the various versions located here.

The company released this message:

“On behalf of BitDefender, we are very sorry for the problems that our update may have caused. We have also released a solution to this issue, for all affected users, we invite you to access it here:

[1] http://www.bitdefender.com/site/KnowledgeBase/consumer/#638- home users

http://[2] www.bitdefender.com/site/KnowledgeBase/consumer/#643- BitDefender Business Client users

http://[3] www.bitdefender.com/site/KnowledgeBase/consumer/#642- Bitdefender Security for File Server users