McAfee Woes...

Being in the technology sector by profession has forced me to deviate to this posting. A recent update to a number of McAfees' products went terribly awry, causing them to flag hundreds of legitimate third-party programs as hostile and prompting users to delete or quarantine them. The files identified by McAfee as malicious included excel.exe (Microsoft Excel) and gtb2k1033.exe (Google Toolbar installer), as well as programs that run Macromedia Flash Player, Sun's Java application and Adobe update manager.
The wrong flags even apply to updaterui.exe, McAfee's own auto-update program.(Kicking myself....is that the new polciy mcafee?) The full list of programs wrongly marked as bad is here in PDF format. (Only file names, not the product names)

The SANS Internet Storm Center has a decent writeup on the problem.

McAfee's solution for customers is interesting: "Users who have moved detected files to quarantine should restore them to their original location. Windows users who have had files deleted should restore files from backup or use System Restore."

How many got fired from Mcafee? How many of you Mcafee employees got a red signal reading their access badges next day morning?


..... ok this should be a pacifier for now ...till the next time I return with more tech woes.