Forum Moderators: phranque
For over five hours Friday, McAfee's anti-virus software erroneously flagged hundreds of legitimate executables as a malicious virus, leading some customers to quarantine or delete the offending files and render applications such as Microsoft Excel inoperative.
There was one byte off in a signature, and there was a hole in our testing process.
Was that the straw that broke the camels back? Whatever market share they had their fingers into probably just dwindled considerably. I've never used McAfee.
What worries me most though is how much we trust some of these companies. But because they promote themselves to be focussed and have only our (and the net population's) best interests at heart then we download all their updates without questioning.
I am sure we will hear a lot more about this as the day goes on.
[free.grisoft.com...]
McAfee has worked great for us for years, but this was a real snafu.
The real problem, is that McAfee didn't have a network aware program to unQuaratine all these files, and if you choose to delete suspected files instead of Quarantine them, you were really toast, relying on system backups and system restore.
McAfee did come out with a micky mouse program to unQuarantine files, but you had to run around to every machine to fix the problem.
After updating 70 computers, its gets kind of tedious.
It could have really screwed up my computer and I wondered how many people just let it blindly finish.
Probably quite a few. It appears that McAfee's target audience is mostly new users and based on my experience with new users, they are going to follow the instructions on the screen if they understand them. :(
I guess we'll know more as the week progresses as many are most likely recovering from the issue and getting things in order. For some, they may still be down.
It was, of course, a false positive.
Matt
I wouldn't be surprised if there were lots of little claims against them for messing up people's computers and programmes I would imagine!
Needless to say, there's got to be some disclaimer for them in place limiting their liability on this issue. Of course, that doesn't mean people won't try anyway! More likely is large corporations that were down / lost work because of this taking a go at litigation.
You would think that during the testing processes, a PC with Microsoft Office products installed, would be a common test ground.
I guess not.
McAfee's target audience is mostly new users
Wrong. We use McAfee Enterprized Edition, and my day job is with a major department of the Government of Canada, which has standarized on McAfee.
Wrong
The keyword in that sentence is "mostly". I realize there are corporate users of McAfee too. ;)
had to spend a few minutes convincing father in law that this "free 6 month subscription" to mcafee he got with his new dell was really not worth
I have never seen a worse product than McAfee, although Norton is definetely right up there. I'm not clear on why they call themselves 'anti' virus, since every norton or mcafee 'protected' machine I've ever looked at has had many viruses installed, plus trojans, etc.
This observation has been confirmed to me by others who know better than me. Virus authors have little or no respect for either product, for good reason.
I used avg + antivir to clean the machines off, that's what IT department unofficially used as their main infection cleaning agents.
However, I'm finding that GNU/Linux is quite affective at this point, far better than anything else I've tried.
On windows I use either avg or antivir for free stuff, nod32 for paid.
I've seen many articles on the failed mcafee update this week in many different media outlets. Did it make usatoday? or der spiegel? or the observer? I have no idea.
There's an article on the McAfee incident and some of the problems it highlights here [computerworld.com] at Computerworld....
The McAfee incident highlights the need for companies to configure their antivirus software so that it just quarantines suspicious software instead of deleting it outright, Ullrich said. It also underscores the need for companies to have good backup and restore policies in place to deal with such accidental losses of data, he said."Having your [antivirus] software go bad is just one of the ways by which you can lose data," he said.
McAfee isn’t the first company to run into a problem with its antivirus software. Earlier this year, Microsoft Corp.’s antispyware beta software mistakenly flagged Symantec Corp. Norton antivirus product as a Trojan program. And last year, a Trend Micro Inc. software update caused CPU usage to increase dramatically on machines on which it was installed.
It appears that McAfee's target audience is mostly new users
It came bundled on a "refurbished, de-branded" machine I got a good deal on. I have long been annoyed by the pop-up "Time to upgrade McAfee" announcement; now I have good reason to make time to uninstall it! Man am I glad I did not "Upgrade."
Norton will have to go too- what a resource hog! I will look into some of the suggested alternatives now.
Friday!
-Automan
which 'media'? which 'this'?
I meant mainstream media mentioning this not industry mags etc. You'd think this would be fairly big news of interest to a lot of people. Guess not
Plus, this was a single update, it was pulled immediately I assume, fixed, and then rereleased, so it really only affected a very small number, relatively, of users.
But it's a great example of just how bad these companies are, norton is the same, they've had similar issues with their internet 'security' suite, and their system admin garbage, exactly the same stuff.
Now that I haven't used any norton or mcaffee products for over a year on any system I'm taking care of, and all my friends are now off norton/mcaffee, I find that all the systems are much more stable, virus free, and give almost no headaches.
Why anyone uses this garbage is beyond me, it doesn't work, it's bloated, it slows your system down, and at times kills it. That's a constant, so it's not really news.
In a way, norton/mcaffee and windows are really made for each other, about the same quality level in each. Luckily there's good alternatives to use, although they don't get the public awareness in computer circles they should. AVG for example is at least as good as norton, same with antivir, and they are much better programmed, not as intrusive, don't bog down your system.
What's funny is that nod32 is about the same price as norton, but it's radically superior in every way, and renewals are I think cheaper in blocks than norton, so why anyone uses norton/mcafee just has to come down to not knowing any better and inertia.
