Latest McAfee Update Hoses SP3 Computers

[isamuelson]

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/21/mcafee-update-going-nuts-shutting-down-millions-of-xp-machines/?

http://www.neowin.net/news/mcafee-update-is-locking-users-out-of-their-systems-do-not-update33?

Two blogs talking about McAfee. However, I can tell you from experience it's true. My company runs XP SP2 and XP SP3. At about 10:45 am EST, I got a message from McAfee that there was a virus and it was shutting my computer down.

10 minutes later, I had no network access and my task bar was minimized and I couldn't resize it and the Lock Taskbar option was checked and greyed out.

3 hours later, I'm back up and running and our field services people confirmed it was a .DAT released by McAfee and it affected anyone with SP3, which turned out to be over 5,000 in our company.

This isn't the first time this has happened. Years ago, McAfee released a patch that under certain circumstances wiped out the FAT on your hard drive.

At least I'm back up and running.

 

[Saga Lout]

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/21/mcafee-update-going-nuts-shutting-down-millions-of-xp-machines/?

http://www.neowin.net/news/mcafee-update-is-locking-users-out-of-their-systems-do-not-update33?

Two blogs talking about McAfee. However, I can tell you from experience it's true. My company runs XP SP2 and XP SP3. At about 10:45 am EST, I got a message from McAfee that there was a virus and it was shutting my computer down.

10 minutes later, I had no network access and my task bar was minimized and I couldn't resize it and the Lock Taskbar option was checked and greyed out.

3 hours later, I'm back up and running and our field services people confirmed it was a .DAT released by McAfee and it affected anyone with SP3, which turned out to be over 5,000 in our company.

This isn't the first time this has happened. Years ago, McAfee released a patch that under certain circumstances wiped out the FAT on your hard drive.

At least I'm back up and running.

I heard about this earlier today and find it amazing people leave their security to a company like McAfee. They used to be good but, like Norton (usless since Peter sold out) they've become too big a resource hog to be of any use.

 

[isamuelson]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=2031&tag=content;wrapper

Ed Bott wrote on article on ZDNet that talks about how this snafu was preventable. One thing that really caught my attention was this:

Product Testing – there was inadequate coverage of Product and Operating System combinations in the test systems used. Specifically, XP SP3 with VSE 8.7 was not included in the test configuration at the time of release.

Whoops! Well, I was one of those XP SP3 people that got hosed by this obvious and blatant skipping of QA steps. It rendered my work laptop useless in that I had NO network connections at all.

Ed's article lists items he received from a memo from McAfee. Many of these items he states have been "scrubbed" from the FAQ that is now posted on McAfee's site (of course, 2 days later AFTER the incident).

McAfee has really hosed themselves. Hopefully, this will teach all the other anti-virus companies a lesson and puts them on alert that skipping QA steps for ANY reason is not justifiable, especially when it could cause the anti-virus programs to behave just like the programs it's meant to stop.
[:isamuelson:8]

 

[Saga Lout]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=2031&tag=content;wrapper

Ed Bott wrote on article on ZDNet that talks about how this snafu was preventable. One thing that really caught my attention was this:

Product Testing – there was inadequate coverage of Product and Operating System combinations in the test systems used. Specifically, XP SP3 with VSE 8.7 was not included in the test configuration at the time of release.

Whoops! Well, I was one of those XP SP3 people that got hosed by this obvious and blatant skipping of QA steps. It rendered my work laptop useless in that I had NO network connections at all.

Ed's article lists items he received from a memo from McAfee. Many of these items he states have been "scrubbed" from the FAQ that is now posted on McAfee's site (of course, 2 days later AFTER the incident).

McAfee has really hosed themselves. Hopefully, this will teach all the other anti-virus companies a lesson and puts them on alert that skipping QA steps for ANY reason is not justifiable, especially when it could cause the anti-virus programs to behave just like the programs it's meant to stop.
[:isamuelson:8]

All so very true. One is reminded of the ill-fated M$ UPdate KB977165 that came out with the February second Tuesday batch of patches and band aids for the holiest of systems . The following day, because the anti-Rootkit fix had destroyed already infected systems ability to go online, and because the Rootkit hacker found that was bad for business, they had to bring out their own fix the next day. Those were two fairly busy days over at TSG and,. I daresay, here as well.