Performance/alert-flooding issue affecting F-Secure Linux Security 7.x installations

On January 30, 2009, F-Secure shipped an update for the F-Secure Linux Security 7.x product which initiated the creation of a debug log file for the Hydra scanning engine.

The hydra.log file created can grow very large, taking up several gigabytes of disk space. The logfile is located in directory /var/opt/f-secure/fssp/hydra.log. When the log file exceeds about 2 GB, system performance is affected resulting also in engine malfunction error messages which are written into fsoasd.log, the real-time scanning daemon log file. The system may also run out of disk space.

On February 4, 2009, F-Secure shipped a database update for the F-Secure Linux Security 7.x product (F-Secure Hydra Update 2009-02-04_09). This update resolved the issue with the excessively growing hydra.log.

Note: The log file is not deleted automatically from the file system. Therefore it needs to be removed manually by using the following command: # rm -f /var/opt/f-secure/fssp/hydra.log

F-Secure has already implemented steps to improve our testing procedures to prevent a similar problem from re-occurring in the future. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused by the incident.