McAfee Update Thinks Windows XP is a Virus
McAfee Update Thinks Windows XP is a Virus
Posted 04/21/2010 at 2:50pm
| by Ryan Whitwam
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Users of McAfee's corporate antivirus product found themselves wrestling with some pretty serious problems today. The most recent DAT update for the antivirus suite caused the scanner to identify the benign Windows svchost.exe file as a virus. The antivirus' course of action is clear; it deletes the file. The result is a lot of crashed PCs and unhappy IT departments. This isn't even the first time McAfee has had an error like this.
When the gravity of the situation was made clear, McAfee pulled the update from their servers and reiterated that it had only been pushed out to machines running the corporate edition of the software. The problem, according to McAfee, mainly affects PCs running XP SP3. Given that a lot of business environments still run on XP, that's a lot of potential machines.
McAfee has issued a "fix", but inexplicably, it only helps those who haven't yet had their machines crash after receiving the update. Currently, the only way for IT departments to fix the issue involves repairing the Windows install manually. Has anyone out there had any experience with this bug today?
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knexkid
April 22, 2010 at 6:41am
I'm at the University of Illinois and yesterday all the public computers (which is A LOT by the way) were shut down due to a potential virus....I guess this is why (yes they run McAfee).
nlopes
April 22, 2010 at 4:51am
Around 20% of our business got hit with this. At HQ it mainly affected
the IT dept. I was at lunch and came back to everyone running around, at that point we still thought it was a virus.
Josh Rosberg
April 21, 2010 at 8:13pm
Our IT department didn't know what was wrong and thought it was the server til I informed them it wasn't. I'd say i'm not going to be working til friday at the rate they're going.
evolution76
April 21, 2010 at 8:02pm
Live the state of kentucky, and it shut down alot of police and school computers........
The Absence of Evidence is not the Evidence of Absence
JonnyNYK
April 21, 2010 at 5:44pm
I have....and so did about 30% of our entire company, worldwide...needless to say I've had to re-explain this issue to about 100 people today so far, and worked overtime to replace those scvhost files with working ones. But this isn't all of the story. This issue caused infinite rebooting. And when the rebooting stopped for a lot of people, it took away thier taskbar and connection to the network. We weren't informed of a fix till 3:30.
majorsuave
April 21, 2010 at 4:54pm
Did not crash my PC. even though it is running XP SP3. But I guess I can thank the IT dept to select a different antivirus.
Doing software tests so I have to use XP32, there's XP64, Vista 32 and 64 as well as Win7 32/64 all
Cruzg10
April 21, 2010 at 4:39pm
To be fair though, it is small price to pay for using Mcaffee. Seriously who uses Mcaffe aside from consumers to lazy to delete the trial version they received with their brand new "win those pea see"?
icebird
April 22, 2010 at 6:02am
McAfee has always been a hack company whose products prove little better than bloatware, and WORSE than worthless time and again. I think you mean it is THE price you pay for using McAfee.
BinaryMonkey
April 21, 2010 at 3:25pm
We got hit pretty hard by it here, since IT is only slowly transitioning our laptops from XP to Win7.
I'm just glad our lab systems weren't affected, as that would have been a nightmare to clean up.
JanSolo
April 21, 2010 at 3:08pm
Yeah, basically Cisco is down right now because of this issue. Oops!
BigC
April 21, 2010 at 3:02pm
Some one finally realized that windows was a v***s.
Its about time they realized it.
TechJunkie
April 22, 2010 at 4:21am
Apple is the virus. Once you purchase anything apple related, you get subliminal messages telling you how great Steve Handjobs is and that porn is bad for you on thier products.
Caboose
April 21, 2010 at 4:09pm
HAHA you're so funny! Digging up jokes from 10yrs ago!
Your wit is astounding!
-= I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive! Or... a cowboy! =-
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