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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."
One of the commonly percieved risks of viruses is that
'they will delete your files'.
In one fell swoop it seems as though McAfee may have deleted more files
than all the viruses it has removed would have.
The real irony is that all the people who are too lazy/stupid/uneducated to update their anti-virus subscription were protected against this.....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Who in their right mind is going to download and run a script off of an unknown website? I'm sure you're trying to help, but no one should do this. Otherwise they'll need more than just McAfee to fix their computer.