McAfee Anti-Virus Causes Widespread File Damage

AJ Mexico writes, "[Friday] McAfee released an anti-virus update that contained an anomaly in the DAT file that caused many important files to be deleted from affected systems. At my company, tens of thousands of files were deleted from dozens of servers and around 2000 user machines. Affected applications included MS Office, and products from IBM (Rational), GreenHills, MS Office, Ansys, Adobe, Autocad, Hyperion, Win MPM, MS Shared, MapInfo, Macromedia, MySQL, CA, Cold Fusion, ATI, FTP Voyager, Visual Studio, PTC, ADS, FEMAP, STAT, Rational.Apparently the DAT file targeted mostly, if not exclusively, DLLs and EXE files." An anonymous reader added, "Already, the SANS Internet Storm Center received a number of notes from distressed sysadmins reporting thousands of deleted or quarantined files. McAfee in response released advice to restore the files. Users who configured McAfee to delete files are left with using backups (we all got good backups... or?) or System restore."

Comments

Don't use anti-virus!

[$calar]

See, this is another reason why I don't use anti-virus. The truth is viruses don't magically propagate on the Internet, it takes a dummy to do something stupid. Just learn some common sense and avoid these awful programs.

Re:Help!

[Master of Transhuman]

Just had a client who was installing his Mac and wanted me to hook him up to the Internet.

First thing he asked was, what did he need to be secure from the viruses?

I told him there ARE NO VIRUSES for Mac OSX. And damn little spyware - so little that no one has written an open source anti-spyware tool for the Mac, although there are one or two commercial products probably not worth buying.

I pointed him to ClamXav anyway, but told him that was just for protecting him from forwarding an email infected from a Windows machine to another Windows machine.