For those people that use the AVG anti-virus along with the ZoneAlarm firewall will surely had an unpleasant surprise when AVG suddenly started to block and quarantine Check Point’s popular firewall solution. The false positive was caused by a bogus malware definition file update and AVG eventually addressed the issue. This problem affected all versions of ZoneAlarm and AVG, both free and commercial; thus, the users assaulted the ZoneAlarm support forum with reports that AVG started to detect ZoneAlarm as a Trojan by the name of Agent_r.CX. Several ZoneAlarm components were being blocked and quarantined and attempts at reinstalling the firewall software failed. At the same time, similar reports popped up on the AVG forums.
AVG Resident Shield blocked Zone Alarm Pro vsmon.exe from loading after identifying five (5) ZA files in Windows/System32/ZoneLabs/lib as infected with Trojan Horse Agent_r.CX: ConfigWizard.zip.dll, licenseui.zip.dll, zlsvc.zip.dll, zpy.zip.dll, zui.zip.dll. Laura Yecies, General Manager at Check Point, the company that develops ZoneAlarm, AVG was immediately notified and issued a definitions fix in a matter of hours. However, since both AVG and ZoneAlarm products have free versions that are quite popular, it’s safe to assume that a considerable number of users were affected in this incident, too.
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