Apples Software Update gets blocked by Cortex XDR

[ReisingerM]

Hello Palo Community,

does anybody know why the Apple SoftwareUpdate.exe got blocked by Cortex XDR  today

Or has someone else also encountered this Problem?

In the Community section of VirusTotal I discoverd a comment that Palo Alto apperently changed the status at one point, yet i have some triggers with this software that came in today.

 https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/0682eef4ae722d6dad6b0c41f530d86e44f094f8487105372d5a03e0f0a437e9...

Thank you in advance,

ReisinM

[AZelle]

Hi,

yes, I can confirm. This happend yesterday on several hundred machines. But not only SoftwareUpdater.exe was affected, some other obviously clean tools, also.

The verdicts were already changed to benign yesterday in the evening.

Strange behavior which makes me a little nervous. Could happen to critical programs, too.

BR
Andreas

[bbarmanroy]

Hi @ReisingerM and @AZelle this might be due to a potential issue with Wildfire verdicts within the last 24 hrs, which have been re-analyzed and re-categorized appropriately. Can you cross-check and validate if most of those alert types are Detection (Post Detected) or Prevention (Post Detected)?

[ReisingerM]

Hello @bbarmanroy indeed all alerts concerning this problem are Detection (Post Detected).

[AZelle]

Hi @bbarmanroy, yes it has been all Post Detected.

[ReisingerM]

I also Posted this in General Topics to see if someone ther was able to confirme my suspicion and i got answere there https://live.paloaltonetworks.com/t5/general-topics/apple-softwareupdate-exe-got-blocked-by-cortex-x...

 

[MartinPfeil]

It is benign software, initally identified as malware.

Same thing happend in the last two days for other software updates, like for Epson and HP:

Initially identified as malicious but then the verdict was reversed a few hours later.

Files had to be released manually and hashes had to be added by hand to the whitelist

[bbarmanroy · Accepted solution]

Hi @ReisingerM and @AZelle thank you for confirming. The issue has been resolved now. 

@MartinPfeil I understand the problems you faced and added the files to the global Allow List as a tactical measure. I'd suggest you can remove them now from the Allow List to prevent it from expanding with time and make it difficult to manage. Allow Lists and Block Lists are short-term measures and should ideally be avoided as a long-term solution.