April 21, 2010

Reason #23 why I don't use McAfee AntiVirus

Amazing. What a screw up.

We're hearing from all over that a bad McAfee for Windows XP update is causing computers worldwide to shut down. Apparently DAT update 5958 deletes the svchost.exe file, which then triggers a false-positive in McAfee itself and sets off a chain of uncontrolled restarts and loss of networking functionality.

And, of course, it was auto-downloaded by most of those machines, because McAfee's antivirus package nags you incessantly if you disable auto-download.

Word is that the only fix McAfee can come up with requires service staff to manually fix each and every computer which was involved. I'm sure that corporate IT departments are overjoyed.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 12:06 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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1 Bah, at least IT staff know what to do. If that happened to my daughter who is using her laptop in Japan, it would be the end of the road for that box. The only thing I would trust her to do is to buy a new one.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 21, 2010 12:26 PM (/ppBw)

2 It appears that the bad update only went to corporate customers, which is good for normal folks, and really, really bad for McAfee. Between losing most of their corporate customers and having to pay for the cleanup, I suspect that big office building on 101 is going to have a "for lease" sign up soon.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at April 21, 2010 12:43 PM (fpXGN)

3 Yep, I got an email about it myself a couple of hours ago.

There is, of course, no way for us users to shut down McAfee virus scanning on our PCs.

When Deacon told me "McAfee is going away soon," he neglected to mention it would be in a blaze of stupidity.

Posted by: ubu at April 21, 2010 12:53 PM (i7ZAU)

4

News reports about who was affected by it have included at least one police department and one hospital. Just great publicity, you know...

Mr. McAfee himself, it turns out, is currently living like a native in Belize, trying to do good works.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 21, 2010 01:08 PM (+rSRq)

5 Hmm, that's odd.  I have McAfee installed on this computer, with auto-updates enabled, and I haven't seen any probl

Posted by: Siergen at April 21, 2010 01:21 PM (0Rm2P)

6 When I got this computer, it came with a 90-day McAfee license.  When that license expired, I went to uninstall it, and discovered that I had to go to McAfee's web site to download the uninstall program.

...when I learned that, nothing in this universe could have convinced me to keep using McAfee or to use it ever again.

I've been using Avast! ever since.  Perfectly happy with it.

Posted by: atomic_fungus at April 21, 2010 03:54 PM (Pm3HF)

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