Ever got hacked by your Anti Virus?

I just got the funniest call from a client, back story; we're doing a compliance audit for a customer. In doing so, we reviewed some security control integration, including integrating Slack notifications for failed attempts on network-attached devices. (This small detail is amusing in a second)

Our client's Slack kept reporting a Windows machine brute forcing failed login attempts on different network devices. Well, in this land of Mac computers, just like with many Mac-only organizations, there's always the one accounting PC that runs the Windows-only accounting software.

However, in this case, the one PC's AVG install was the culprit for all of the Slack alerts for failed login attempts from different devices on their network.

Our client's head of IT needed clarification about why AVG was port scanning and brute-forcing his internal network and did some research to learn about AVG's Traffic Inspector Tool, only to find out that it is indeed its intended function.

I feel bad because it was a false positive, but it's nice to know all the new alerting was making management more painless for our client, so at least we did our job, right?

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