This news is bound to send shivers up your spine or even make you break your PC since its a norm for anti-virus updates to be updated daily or frequently. Who would have known that doing that could have damaged your Windows software and clogged up the Helpdesk with calls. Looks like McAfee needs to buck up on their Change Management controls.
For over five hours last Friday, a flawed update for McAfee's anti-virus software erroneously detected hundreds of legitimate executables as a malicious virus, leading some customers to quarantine or delete the offending files and render applications such as Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet, Adobe's Flash, the Google Toolbar installer, several Adaptec drivers, and parts of Sun Microsystems' Java Runtime Environment to be inoperative.
Depending on how users had configured VirusScan, the harmless files were either quarantined to a special folder or deleted. In either case, applications were broken as files were moved or erased from hard drives.
The flawed DAT went out at 10:35 a.m. PST Friday, said Joe Telafici, director of operations at McAfee's AVERT Labs. "About two hours later, we started getting reports of large numbers of files identified as W95/CTX," he said. McAfee pushed out a corrected DAT a couple hours after that, at 3:28 p.m. PST.
» Bit9 Windows File Advisor from ITechTips
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Tracked on: March 21, 2006 11:32 PM | Permalink to Trackback