A few days ago a student uploaded a document with a macro virus to his online class as part of an assignment. When either he or the instructor opened the file, Norton detected the virus and notified Safe Web, and now all students and instructors using the system are getting a warning about the infected file. Many of the users are confused about the warning and scared to use the site and are calling their help desk.
The infected file requires authentication to view, and only the student and instructor have access to it. This means Safe Web servers could not have downloaded it to verify that it existed and was infected. Is the warning based only on a Norton client reporting the problem?
I registered and became manager of the site earlier today, and followed the prompts to clear the warning. Does anyone know how long it takes for the site to be re-examined? Is it really up to two weeks?
The course system serves 14 colleges and universities, and the help desks at some of them have started advising users to ignore warnings from Safe Web. While I hate that from a security perspective, I'm not sure they're going to take the time to teach their users more about it when it's faster to tell them to ignore it or worse, uninstall Norton.