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McAfee Anti-Virus Causes Widespread File Damage

Posted by ryuzaki0 on 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)

  1. Re:There's gotta be a way to blame this on Bush... by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    There's gotta be a way to blame this on Bush. Somehow he was responsible.

    No problem. Bush was elected, then suddenly all the anti-trust remedies against MS were gutted. MS was not broken up into several competing companies and thus had no motivation to create a better product to compete against the other "baby-MS's." Since they had no such motivation they did not release a new version of their OS that was fairly secure by default and they did not sell it at a competitively low price. As a result more companies and individuals had to buy anti-virus add ons and were thus burned by this malfunction. See, that wasn't too hard.

  2. Re:The real irony here.... by hackstraw · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    I mean, yes, you're lazy, but damn, man, it's just Google.

    My point was that I don't use any computers that need such a thing or to my knowledge, there are even subscription offerings for anti-virus subscriptions.

    Currently, I run OS X, Linux, and Solaris, and I have never known anybody that has needed an anti-virus subscription for them.

    Am I missing out on the fun?