McAfee’s had better weeks. One of the largest antivirus software vendors committed the cardinal sin last week of pushing out a software update that somehow listed a key component of the Windows XP operating system as a threat, causing thousands of machines to shutdown and reboot themselves over and over again.
The mix-up showcased what many angry customers described as woeful incompetence in the company’s quality assurance group. The fact that it took company officials more than a day to publicly apologize for the mistake made matters even worse.
eSecurity Planet looks into the circumstances behind McAfee’s embarrassing missteps and what it and its customers are doing to ensure their PCs are debilitated by future security updates.
McAfee’s botched virus definition file update last week crashed hundreds of thousands of PCs around the world, enraged customers and sent the security software vendor’s worldwide customer support team into full scramble mode and had executives issuing a string of mea culpas along the way.
The faulty signature update file mistakenly flagged the critical SVCHOSE.EXE file for Windows XP SP3 as a threat and quarantined it, causing machines running XP and to shut down every 60 seconds.
Further complicating matters was the fact that most of the affected users, particularly those folks just using their PC at home and not at work, weren’t able to even get online to access the McAfee site to find any explanation or remedy for the issue.
