Flawed McAfee update paralyzes corporate PCs

From InfoWorld: A flawed McAfee anti-virus update sent enterprise administrators scrambling today as the new signatures quarantined a crucial Windows system file, crippling an unknown number of Windows XP computers, according to messages on the company's support forum.

The forum has since gone offline.

McAfee confirmed it had pushed the faulty anti-virus update to users. "McAfee is aware that a number of customers have incurred a false positive error due to incorrect malware alerts on Wednesday, April 21," said company spokesman Joris Evers in an email reply to questions. "The problem occurs with the 5958 virus definition file (DAT) that was released on April 21 at 2:00 P.M. GMT+1 (6:00 A.M. Pacific)."

According to users on McAfee's support forum, today's update flagged Windows' "svchost.exe" file, a generic host process for services that run from other DLLs (dynamic link libraries).

As of 3:30 p.m. ET, McAfee's support forum was offline, with a message reading "The McAfee Community is experiencing unusually large traffic which may cause slow page loads. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

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