McAfee apologizes for antivirus update disaster

From CNET News.com: Acknowledging the chaos it caused by pushing out a buggy antivirus update on Wednesday, McAfee apologized to its customers in the form of a late-night blog on Thursday.

Barry McPherson, executive vice president of support and customer service, issued the apology on behalf of McAfee, saying the company was sorry for the headaches it caused for so many customers.

At 6 a.m. PDT Wednesday, the company released a faulty update to its antivirus software that hosed computers running Windows XP with Service Pack 3. The update, a DAT file, misidentified a key Windows file called svchost.exe as a virus, causing PCs to crash or keep rebooting. The problem affected customers worldwide, including chipmaker Intel, Rhode Island hospitals, Kentucky police, University of Michigan's medical school, and an Australian supermarket chain

In response, McAfee staffers have been working around the clock to help customers get their systems back online, McPherson said. The company believes most impacted PCs are back up.

He also detailed the fix that McAfee quickly patched together for early Thursday morning. The SuperDAT Remediation Tool stifles the updated driver that creates the false positive and then restores the svchost.exe file. McAfee said support reps are available for anyone who needs further help.

How did this problem occur in the first place? The short answer: poor testing. McAfee recently changed its quality assurance process, leading to the buggy DAT file to get past the test environment and onto the PCs of customers, MacPherson said.

View: Article @ Source Site