A recent anti virus update issued by McAfee caused absolute havoc as it effectively shut down thousands of windows XP computers across the globe and now McAfee are “sorry”.
What happened is that after applying Update 5958 some users experienced the blue screen of death and other major errors.
It seems that the update caused computers running windows XP service pack 3 to incur false positives and shut down which meant that many businesses were out of action for a considerable amount of time.
McAfee tried to play it down by saying the problem affected less than half of a percent of their customers and that they were working round the clock to fix the problem but that didn’t stop a wave of outrage as angry customers flooded the net with their comments.
Now Barry McPherson, executive vice president of support and customer service at McAfee has now issued an apology via his blog.
“First off, I want to apologize on behalf of McAfee and say that we’re extremely sorry for any impact the faulty signature update file may have caused you and your organizations” wrote McPherson.
“McAfee team members have been working around the clock to fix the problem and work with impacted customers.
“We estimate that the majority of the affected systems are back up and running at this time and more systems are coming back online quickly”.
McAfee had earlier issued a SuperDAT Remediation Tool which suppressed the driver that caused the false positive to occur and also restored the svchost.exe file which was quarantined by the update.
“The tool has been successful at remediating the problem caused by the faulty DAT update for multiple customers” added McPherson.
McAfee are taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again by “implementing additional QA protocols for any releases that directly impact critical system files” and by adding capabilities to their cloud-based Artemis system that will “provide an additional level of protection against false positives by leveraging an expansive whitelist of critical system files”.
“Again, on behalf of McAfee, I’m very sorry for how you may have been impacted by the faulty DAT file update and thank you for your continued support and cooperation as we work to remediate the situation” wrote McPherson.
What else can they do, mistakes will always happen.
