McAfee Anti-Virus Causes Widespread File Damage

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Monday March 13, 2006 @02:02AM from the who-can-you-trust? dept.

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."

2 of 353 comments (clear)

Help! by vjmurphy · 2006-03-13 02:04 · Score: 5, Funny

I need virus protection from my virus protection!

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Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
I haven't had any problems by myth24601 · 2006-03-13 02:35 · Score: 5, Funny

I use McAfee and My system is working fi

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No matter where you go, there you are.