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.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
-
curnel_D 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.Reply
Thanks McAfee! :) -
rooket 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.Reply -
digitalprospecter I wonder if the recent change to their QA Environment involved a disgruntled employee?Reply -
masterofm Guess what have we been doing the past two days? We have had several cases at MS related to this issue... a real headache.Reply