Santa Clara (ip-192.com): Antivirus company McAfee apologized for it’s for its latest update that took down thousands of computers around the world. "We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused our customers," said Barry McPherson on a McAfee blog post. The false positive brought thousands of computers running Microsoft’s Windows XP, SP3 to its knees. Affected companies and owners will have to manually clean their machines to get them working again.
"In the past 24 hours, McAfee identified a new threat that impacts Windows PCs. Researchers worked diligently to address this threat that attacks critical Windows system executables and buries itself deep into a computer’s memory," said McPherson. "McAfee is aware that a number of customers have incurred a false positive error due to this release. We believe that this incident has impacted less than one half of one percent of our enterprise accounts globally and a fraction of that within the consumer base..."
Meanwhile, McAfee's Business Community blogger site and Twitter are awash with comments from angry users. It seemed that the National Science Foundation, hospitals, and local police stations were affected, among many others. Computers that used McAfee's VirusScan 8.7 started to reboot randomly after a critical Windows system file was flagged as a potential virus.
McAfee has posted an update to remedy the situation here. The site contains a link for further troubleshooting if users are unable to update their virus definitions.
[...] Santa Clara (ip-192.com): McAfee says that it will reimburse users affected by the faulty update to its security software. The “false positive” did wreck havoc on computers worldwide that updated their Antivirus signatures last week (ip-192.com reported here). [...]