An update released by antivirus giant McAfee to its corporate users Wednesday contained a buggy detection routine that made plentiful of computers to go into a restart loop. Universities, hospitals and several companies across the US reported issues once getting the update. The severe system instability problem stemmed from incorrect blocking of the critical svchost.exe file on Pcs running Windows XP SP3.
The first update was launched Wednesday, the 21st of April, at 2.00 PM Pacific time. It was pulled off only a couple hours later. The company then rolled out a corrected update, DAT 5959, hours once the bogus definition went out. But, the release has to be set out to affected systems manually in Safe Mode, a bad experience for IT staff in large companies with lots of Pcs.
“Mistakes happen. No excuses. The nearly 7,000 employees of McAfee are focused right now on two things, in this order. First, help our customers who have been affected by this issue get back to business as usual. And second, once that is done, make sure we put the processes in place so this never happens again,” commented Executive Vice President of Worldwide Technical Support and Customer Service for McAfee, Barry McPherson.
According to DownlaodSquad’s Lee Mathews, this nightmare is a crucial hit to McAfee’s image as a security software specialist. This mistake might very well determine IT staff to consider changing to another security software.
“Yes, McAfee has released a fix — but it’s one that has be applied hands-on at each affected computer. That’s going to create serious pains-in-the-ass for loads of admins and technicians around the globe — and pissed off admins are never averse to switching software when it decides to create a titanic load of extra work for them,” said Mathews.
