[Attrition Staff Note: This is at least the second time an antvirus vendor has mistakenly classified Spotify as a virus -- see also /errata/autofail/mcafee-af-09.html]
Symantec has apologised over a cock-up that resulted in the incorrect classification of streaming music service Spotify as a Trojan on Thursday.
A misfiring anti-virus definition update caused Symantec's Norton security software to wrongly classified Spotify program files as malign and shuffled them off into quarantine. Symantec responded quickly to the problem by issuing a fix that quashed the false alarm. Even after they update their security software, Symantec users may still have to reinstall Spotify in order to listen to the service again.
Spotify's take on the mix-up can be found here. Symantec's mea culpa is here.
False alarms involving security scanners packages are a regular occurrence that, if anything, seem to be growing in frequency. Only last week a dodgy update from Kaspersky Lab labeled Google AdSense as malign. On other occasions Windows systems files or applications get black-flagged by anti-virus scanners, a snag Spotify has hit before.
Last May a dodgy McAfee update slapped a viral warning on Spotify, causing much the same problems as the Symantec miss-classification.