Slashdot Mirror
McAfee To Pay For PC Repairs After Patch Fiasco
Barence writes "McAfee has offered to pay for the PC repairs of consumers affected by last week's faulty antivirus update. The problematic patch falsely identified the SVCHOST.EXE Windows file as a virus, causing PCs running Windows XP SP3 to crash or enter endless reboot cycles. In a blog post addressed to 'Home or Home Office Consumers,' the company offered to reimburse PC repair expenses, though there was a notable caveat. 'If you have already incurred costs to repair your PC as a result of this issue, we're committed to reimbursing reasonable expenses,' the company said. 'Reasonable expenses' has yet to be formally defined."
Should McAfee really be on the hook for your departments poor IT practices? Every one of those computers should have been remotely re-imaged, and as all campus data was kept on centralised servers then you should have lost no data, your job should have consisted of queuing systems for re-imaging, not much more.
People are railing McAfee here for poor QA, and they rightly should - but you have just demonstrated your own poor QA. Who in their right mind releases a patch to their entire install base at once? Release it to 10 computers and monitor for a couple of days. Then released it to 50 more and continue monitoring. Keep including groups until all computers have been covered without issue. How hard is that?