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McAfee Virus update leaves PCs unbootable

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A recent McAfee service pack led to systems being rendered unbootable, according to posts on the security giant's support forums.

The mandatory service pack for McAfee's corporate Virus scanning product, VSE 8.7, was designed to address minor security bugs but instead tagged windows system files as malware. The software update was issued on 27 May and pulled on 2 June, after problems occurred. Users were advised to keep the patch if they'd already installed it in a low-key announcement on McAfee's knowledge base.

Posts on McAfee's support forum paint a different picture of PCs and server left unbootable after the update had automatically deleted Windows systems files wrongly identified as potentially malign. Our source among the McAfee user community, who asked not to be named, described the incident as a "massive fail" by McAfee and reports that sysadmins are angry that a long awaited patch turned out to do more harm than good.

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reply to Stem Bolt
Happily, my employer chose to stay with 8.5 for the present.

reply to Stem Bolt
Hmmmm... Back in May of this year a friend of a friend of a friend was given my phone# to see if I could fix her computer. She told me it suddenly stopped booting after an antivirus update. I asked her what antivirus and she said Norton and McAfee. I told her that was a no no and to bring it over. A few days later she called and told me she bought a new computer and took the old one to a recycling plant.
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Prevent Malware

reply to Stem Bolt
VBScript with the ability to remove the patch from affected computers remotely

reply to dolphins
Norton and McAfee oughta be shut down.. This is the year of the "Bigger they are, the harder they should fall..." syndrome...

1. The American Auto Industry...

2. Realogy..

3. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE Norton and McAfee!
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I'm proud to be a troublemaker! America was founded by "troublemakers"!

reply to Stem Bolt
I have 8.7i with patch 1 installed on a new domain we are creating. About 15 servers with no issues yet.

Still running 8.5 on our production domain and I was just about to pull the trigger on 8.7i patch 1. Guess I wait a bit longer.

reply to Stem Bolt
Thats what you call "complete security"! If you cannot boot, you cannot get infected!

reply to Stem Bolt
Oops. Posted to the wrong thread. I had intended to post in thread
»McAfee false-positive glitch fells PCs worldwide
with a similar problem.
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AT&T dsl; Speedstream 5100b modem; openSuSE 11.0; firefox 3.0.11