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.