McAfee Apologizes for Win XP Antivirus Meltdown
Company speaks after the DAT false-positive fiasco for business customers.
On Wednesday, security software provider McAfee pushed out an updated DAT file that deleted the svchost.exe file, which then triggers a false-positive in McAfee itself. This affected tens of thousands of business computers.
McAfee quickly released a fix, which can be now found here. Barry McPherson, executive vice president of support and customer service, issued the apology on behalf of McAfee in a new company blog post.
Of course many of you are asking how the faulty DAT made it past our quality assurance checks. The problem arose during the testing process for this DAT file. We recently made a change to our QA environment that resulted in a faulty DAT making its way out of our test environment and onto customer systems.
To prevent this from happening again, we are implementing additional QA protocols for any releases that directly impact critical system files. In addition, we plan to add capabilities to our cloud-based Artemis system that will provide an additional level of protection against false positives by leveraging an expansive whitelist of critical system files.
Again, on behalf of McAfee, I’m very sorry for how you may have been impacted by the faulty DAT file update and thank you for your continued support and cooperation as we work to remediate the situation.
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I take apologies better when they're padded with money.
I've made about 200 bucks from this already. Not because the computers I fixed were infected, but because the owners of these computers were convinced that all their problems, past and present, were contributed to this.
Thanks McAfee!
They should buy all those XP users a nice shiny new copy of Windows 7.
I apologize to anyone that I installed mcaffee on in the first place since it purely doesn't work. nothing to do with what happened recently. get avira.
didn't know anyone still used McAfee...
F-ing bloated McAfee and Norton.
Sam: Fred, did you press the red button?
Fred: uh...
I wonder if the recent change to their QA Environment involved a disgruntled employee?
Now they just need to apologize for their software.
Guess what have we been doing the past two days? We have had several cases at MS related to this issue... a real headache.
mcafee internet protection suite started to severely bog down my pentium 4 and when I tried it on my core2duo which is at least 3x faster of a machine, it did the same thing so I immediately uninstalled it and also took it out of the P4. It was supplied by Comcast (comcrap?) as a bandaid fix for their silly 250GB bandwidth limit policy so you could check how much quota you have used for the month on their also overpriced service. I pity anyone who actually had to purchase this product. It is like throwing your money into a furnace and the flames reaching out and grabbing the cash before it even makes it inside.
McAfee and Norton are sucking it lately. I tried AVG and avast! but found stability issues with IE or Outlook when running them, respectively. I just use Microsoft Security Essentials and life is good.
Symantec Corp AntiVirus. Endpoint 11, everything else is a joke, or frustrating, to much trouble with little results...
Image there is no virus scanner ... Ubuntu ...
Symantec Corp AntiVirus. Endpoint 11, everything else is a joke, or frustrating, to much trouble with little results...
I agree, SEP is the best. And also Avira. Everything else is crap.
Comcast last month switched from McAfee to Norton, don't see much of a difference other than I'm so glad I did the switch last month.
mcafee fail. at sschool, one of the teachers runs mcafee on an ancient pc (athlon xp 1.4 ghz i think), its not even connected to the internet, well anyway, about every 3 minutes it gives a popup: SECURITY CENTER UPDATES. MCAFEE MAY NOT BE UP-TO-DATE or someting like that. really stupid...
it's too bad that they had this problem. i've been using the MCAfee Suite that has everything bundled together for some time now. I previously was using SAV but since I've moved all my computers to Win7, I've been using McAfee and i haven't had any issues. I'm running a Thinkpad T410, a Lat D620 and a Dell Studio Slim. No problems whatsoever and I'm pretty happy.
Typical mcafee blunder!
Mcafee is another crapware developed and QAed in India. It beats me how such a obvious bug were not caught by their QA. We don't need virus or terrorist to bring down our systems ... just install McAfee.
This thing shut down 2000+ computers for an entire day at my place of work.
McAfee and Norton are sucking it lately. I tried AVG and avast! but found stability issues with IE or Outlook when running them, respectively. I just use Microsoft Security Essentials and life is good.
I have switched between Agnitum and Zonealarm. Sunbelt Vipre for malware. However, the big problem is not because of malware/viruses is the person behind the mouse and keyboard...
I've made about 200 bucks from this already. Not because the computers I fixed were infected, but because the owners of these computers were convinced that all their problems, past and present, were contributed to this. Thanks McAfee!
Yeah, you're just another one of the business scumbags who take advantage of people's stupidity. Hope karma bites you in the ass...
Gee, I wonder if the ITs will include the cost of this snafu when the McAfee subscription is up for renewal. Lost productivity, lost sales, delayed comms.......
freeware wins people...these paid for antiviruses (Norton, AVG premium, McAfee) are bloated, and useless.
Gee, I wonder if the ITs will include the cost of this snafu when the McAfee subscription is up for renewal. Lost productivity, lost sales, delayed comms.......
If he is a contracted technician, and his customers call him in to do work on their machines, then he is well within his rights to charge for his service. If you were in his shoes, I highly doubt you would just gladly give the money back after spending your time diagnosing an issue whether or not there was a problem.
How do you know when he was called, that he probably said that it wasn't an issue for them, and they demanded he come in anyway, you expect him to do it for FREE?
Mcfee defends: "windows XP is no longer supported by Microsoft, it is not our fault."
haha, Avira is the best antivirus I have tried so far.
)
Their scanner is called Luke Filewalker
major bummer. glad I don't use the utility.
I think the numbers of computers affected was under estimated by a large margin i spent a few days fixing this problem with residential customers didn't get to my business customers yet.
Although i did make a lot of money fixing this i can see class action lawsuit of biblical proportions.
I know of 2 huge corporations looking for compensation because there business was down for 24-48 hrs to fix this blunder.
We lost over 100 computers in my network. I wouldn't have minded so much if it didn't take out the friggin network... I could have fixed them all from my desk. I had to drive all over town.