ProtonVPN conflicts with antivirus software and causes BSOD on Windows
Late last week, Proton Technologies engineers, the company behind development of ProtonMail and ProtonVPN, announced that they are working to fix an issue in the latest client that is causing a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) in Windows users.
It is known that BSOD manifests not in all users, since the root of the problem lies in a conflict with an unnamed antivirus software. There are no patches for this bug yet, but work on it is already underway.
“We were told that under certain circumstances, the latest versions of ProtonVPN clients for Windows (stable version 1.18.2 and early access version 1.18.3) can cause a blue screen in Windows, which occurs due to a conflict with certain antiviruses. If you are affected by this situation, we advise you to either temporarily disable the antivirus, which may conflict with ProtonVPN, or temporarily return to the previous stable version”, — they say developers.
So far, the creators of ProtonVPN do not disclose almost any details of what is happening and do not name security products that can provoke the occurrence of the bug.
Meanwhile, messages from affected users, which began to appear online about two weeks ago, state that BSOD occurs immediately after trying to launch ProtonVPN.
“At the time, customers added to a ProtonVPN support article on Windows connectivity issues that their systems would crash after authentication or after establishing the VPN tunnel”, – reports Bleeping Computer publication.
Just as in the case of the current bug affecting stable and early access ProtonVPN Windows clients, reinstalling the client and the drivers would not help. That is quite similar to errors with System Interrupts – another part of Windows system that sometimes falls into unpredictable errors.
“We are actively working on a fix that will be available shortly”, — added Proton Technologies in a statement on the status of the incident.
Proton Technologies AG is a Swiss technology company originally founded as ProtonMail on 16 May 2014 by a group of scientists from CERN. Proton is located in Geneva, Switzerland.ProtonMail released ProtonVPN in 2017, becoming Proton Technologies. In January 2020, ProtonVPN became fully open source.
Let me also remind you that we wrote that CyberArk Labs Experts Identified Bugs in Popular Antivirus Products.
