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Barry McPherson
Executive Vice President Worldwide Technical Support and Customer Service

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Enterprise : Support :

A Long Day at McAfee

Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 11:14pm by Barry McPherson

As I approach my 14th straight hour on the phone with my worldwide support team, and a number of them logging a similar number of hours, I can assure you that we are still working because I and the rest of the McAfee team are taking the issues raised in your comments to my previous blog, in our support forums, on the phone with us and elsewhere very seriously.

In our ongoing efforts to protect our customers from a seemingly endlessly multiplying variety and volume of attacks, today we released a update file that clearly did more harm than good. There was a legitimate threat and we wanted to protect our customers, as we have done successfully thousands and thousands of times before. But in trying to do so, we created negative and unintended consequences for some very important people. Many of you.

Having talked to literally hundreds of my colleagues around the world and emailed thousands to try and find the best way to correct these issues, let me say this has not been my favorite day. Not for me, or for McAfee. Not by a long shot.

Mistakes happen. No excuses. The nearly 7,000 employees of McAfee are focused right now on two things, in this order. First, help our customers who have been affected by this issue get back to business as usual. And second, once that is done, make sure we put the processes in place so this never happens again.

If you are a enterprise/corporate account, and you have an issue these entries in our virus information library and the knowledge base provide workarounds for this issue. If you are a consumer and have an issue, this support page provides information for impacted consumers or call +1 866 622 3911. We have teams of people standing by to help. (To contact McAfee by phone in your region, go to the “Contact Us” page on our Web site and select your country for the correct number.)

I also recommend customers sign up for our Support Notification Service to get real critical product information via e-mail. Go to the SNS Subscription Preference Center to subscribe. For more information, view the SNS KnowledgeBase article and FAQ.

Barry

Tags: McAfee, Support

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Comments (331)

Samir March 8, 2012 12:21PM

Years ago I used Trend’s free online snencar as part of my shareware protection and then proceeded to use Norton for a few years and then McAfee products. So I was happy to try Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2011. And they are not kidding; this package has so many options that I will never use. But if you have small children and you want to make it harder for them to find ways to get to content you feel is not appropriate this may be the package for you. Though the software loads without problem in order to get full use of all this software’s abilities you will need to take a little time to set up. This is because of the many features offered. I did look at the sections for limiting access and time for users though I do not have that turned on and I am not using the 10 GB backup for I have 1TB backup drives here on site. For your e-mail protection and surfing you need to fine tune the software it seems to be very restrictive even blocking secure sites. But once you have it setup to your particular needs it seems to work well so far. I will come back and update if things change. Trend does a good job of scanning and blocking spyware and virus’. During the life of the license your protection will be updated to help protect you against new threats. I would like a package with a couple less features at a lower cost but many will find this just what they are looking for. Also if you have more than one computer you can buy Trend’s 3 PC License version of this software.

Sara March 8, 2012 2:52AM

On Monday, November 29, 2010 ESG Analyst Jon Oltsik published a erport that looks at the critical infrastructure vulnerabilities in the US, which we have made available here. a0Jon has also recently written a blog which highlights some of the key findings, which you can read here.

Steve February 15, 2012 2:56PM

I recall this issue and through our works contract with McAfee an interim patch was issued very quickly which corrected the issue.

McAfee receive a lot of negative press, especially in blogs and rant sites. A lot of it is unjustified.

keep up the good work.

Steve
http://tinyurl.com/79g5ado

Renata April 25, 2012 6:14AM
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Waco Bankston November 16, 2011 6:00PM

Barry,

I’m the IT Director at STP Nuclear headquartered South of Houston, TX. We are in an outage and having major communications issues with the McAfee EMM product and our support is sub contracted with Ciphent or Accuvant. My team has escalated to me the issue of getting no positive result from the Accuvant support team for over 2 days and our operations team is unable to communicate via email due to the issue. Is there anything you can do or influence to help us in this situation. I plan to engage our contracts division tomorrow to look at contract terms, etc., but I’d really prefer we simply get the EMM system back in operation and defer the former contracts involvement. Can you help? My mobile # is 318-366-1411 and email is cwbankston@stpegs.com. We need help as soon as you can offer it. Thank you so much for listening.

Respectfully,

Waco Bankston
Director of IT
STP Nuclear Operating Co, Inc.

JMR June 22, 2010 10:13PM

Big old smile on my face, running Linux……dropped Windows and all these monkey-bit AV programs long long ago!!!!!!

Anonymous April 29, 2010 11:28AM

Mcafee has recently been offering HORRIBLE protection. I have had what are CLEARLY viruses that Mcafee is too dumb to detect. If you want me to continue using your products, I need to see huge improvement. Mcafee used to be GREAT, but now, it has decreased TO THE POINT OF IRRELEVANCE. So, now, with all of your mistakes, there are more rough antivirus software being advertised, and other people are being infected with them as well. You have caused many computers to be DESTROYED. Today, my friend got the rough antivirus program “XP Antivirus 2010″ and they were stupid enough to pay them, and now they had to through out their computer and credit card. If it weren’t for Mcafee, this problem woudln’t exist. True to form, cybercrooks are taking advantage of the frustration the debacle caused, knowing that people will be searching for alternatives to McAfee’s antivirus protection. Rogue antivirus or “scareware” makers have started pushing links offering fake antivirus software to top of the search engine results. And people are falling for them, causing even more headaches. Make sure you, your friends, family and co-workers are protected from this type of scam. WOT will let you know the reputation of the link – before you click on it. Do someone a favor and install WOT on their computer this weekend. Affected users who want to know how to fix the problem the faulty update caused, our suggestion is to access McAfee’s website directly.

RiCk April 29, 2010 3:16AM

Barry that was a real world ooooooops! Darn, that was almost nasty. Once we became aware of the issue we Simply started each of the 24 potentially affected pc’s into Recovery Console, copied the affected system file from “cache” into the system32 folder and voila` problem solved. Or, was the problem really solved simply by not allowing WinXP SP3 installed on our computers? Thanx Barry, you guys just reinforced my paranoia about Xp SP3. Excellent R&D. Absolutely the most fun I’ve had in weeks. Sorry about all the other problems you are now facing. Hopefully most of your company customers see this as wakeup call to back off a tad on the “automation” of software. After all, we as humans are not infallible, hense what we create can also be less than perfect. What’s that old story? “Made in the image of …”

Mike April 27, 2010 9:52PM

We weren’t affected – Mcafee has never been on our short list because of many past versions either being resource hogs or or just plain wonky. Thanks for continuing to prove us correct.

Peter Weedon April 27, 2010 4:10PM

My computer crashed with this last Wednesday (21st). I was offline for 3 days while the computer was repaired – at considerable cost. I sat with the technician for some of the time and am in no doubt about the hours involved.

Thankfully, he restored my data. But today (27th) an automatic update from McAfee bombs me back to virtually factory settings. 6 DAYS AFTER THE INITIAL FAULT.

This comes after McAfee’s failure to detect a rogue XP Security Tool virus.

And McAfee’s offer of compensation? A 3 month extension to my subscription……

Who do you think you are kidding?

John Smith April 27, 2010 2:43PM

I think the busiest department in your organization right now is not the ’7000 employees’ but the small group that make up your the legal department which must be guiding you on the public respone you have initiated.
It’s ironic and also just that you must now trust the legal department to save your company just as many users/corporations trusted McAffee to save their enterprises from the dreaded virus.
In my view, even if you are able to get through this episode, the long term damage is most likely not recoverable. It’s one thing to make a mistake and then acknowledge that mistake, its quite another to acknowledge the mistake too late to make it meaningful or effective. I think that is the biggest lesson you will learn, albeit most likely too late, but is great stuff for the business schools.

DHemendi April 27, 2010 7:13AM

Barry,

Our organization has been a enterprise McAfee customer for 15 years and being a good corporate citizen we were at the latest McAfee code levels and MS XP patch levels. Our organization was hit with the perfect storm, 8.7, XP SP3 8,000 PC’s in a hospital system and McAfee was nowhere to be found. To make matters worse, your claims of less then .05% of customers hit is unfounded, I’d like to see the data that quantifies that. I know of 25K plus machines in the Northeast hit, and those are just the folks I know. Lastly, and most disturbing, not coming clean with the truth and entirety of your mistake is jepordizing the credibility of the same IT folks that have supported your products for years. To say that almost no customers were affected only instills mistrust from senior leadership of IT credibility in those customers who were hit hard. This tact by McAfee is destroying your customer base and will ruin the livelyhood of many hard-working, exetremely credible, IT professionals. Maybe you should start asking your customers for the real numbers affected and publish information that helps us all through this McAfee created crisis.

Toast April 26, 2010 4:13PM

McAfee, you have done some awful things in the past. I was appalled that my new computer, which was pre-installed with McAfee, and McAfee products used scareware tactics to get me to buy their product, prompting me “Within 60 days, your trial will expire, and your computer will be open to infection!”. Needless to say, I uninstalled McAfee’s security suite, and installed a much better, free, protection. Glad I didn’t have to see this company which uses discouraged marketing tactics screw up my computer.

Note to McAfee users:
UNINSTALL McAFEE.
Install BETTER, FREEWARE virus protection.

TipidWebs March 8, 2012 10:25AM
Wow what a great post. As you say Alex, in future it may be all about the data but the key is getnitg at it and using it. That timely, accurate data we can combine, drill into, correlate It’s not like we’re not awash with data in telecoms, but it’s no good to you rotting in a database you need your data to work harder and help you make better decisions about your customers, your products and your business (among other things). It’s way past the time to open up the silos and liberate the stuff. No good investing in solutions though if you don’t have good quality data to pump into them. So I agree that the two need to go stepwise, hand in hand.The main problem I foresee is that you need to come up with a new three letter acronym to describe this combination of CEM+SDM

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- Fatima April 25, 2012 2:11AM
  LoL.I too have bought 6 month liecnses from different websites.I spent over Rs. 1500/- in trying 6 month liecnses for different softwares including AntiVirus. I kind of liked the idea when first time I learnt about a 6 month license after winning one from DW blog post But then I know its full of disappointment.Others should decide on their own.
  
  Reply

Wes April 26, 2010 2:50PM

Here I sit, some 5 days after having this first stop my PC in it’s tracks. I Was promised last Fri to be called today at 7-nada, then 10-nada, then 12:45-nada. Unbelievable!!

Patrick April 26, 2010 10:16AM

Simple to fix, I did uninstall and get a new Antivirus from somewhere else.
Yes, Mistake heppen but too risky for my biz to go through it again. They should have tested their own system first before they pushed it.

Zainaz March 8, 2012 5:54AM
Kaspersky replaced McAfee on my coutmper, low resource utilization and no problems. Easy installation. Not only can I use my coutmper at any time, I can also print on my wireless connected printer. McAfee decided that since I did not have their product installed on the coutmper on my home network I could not use it. To print I had to disable the firewall. Kaspersky correctly identifies the device as a printer and have no problems using all of the features of my all-in-one. The installation was flawless and fast, even though there was a new version available and the download was large. Full system scan runs very quietly on the background and I don’t even notice it is doing anything, I had to open the window to see if it was still doing it or it was completed. It also ran in half the time of what McAfee used to take, and you do notice McAfee when it is running. Another advantage is that it has not used up another license because I am running a multi-core processor, McAfee had me at five licenses because of this problem. My coutmper is set-up as a single user coutmper. I have not contacted support for anything, so I can’t rate it. I have not found any of the problems reported in other reviews for 64-bit based systems with multi-core processor (Intel i7 X980) and Windows 7 ultimate, every program performs flawlesly and starts faster than they were starting before I switched to Kaspersky.

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- Mohit April 24, 2012 8:18PM
  Nice share Ankit.Let me share with everyone rienadg this post,6 month licenses are more like an extended trial versions (which otherwise are of 30 days). Such licenses do not clean up all the viruses from a system. I have tried it and was highly disappointed by the results. Money wasted. I am now using a 1 year full license and very happy with it,Read all Terms & Conditions before buying 6 month licenses from any company. Hope this helps.
  
  Reply

John April 26, 2010 10:01AM

Dear Editor
We run a small company (started by my wife and I when we were made redundant in December) and employ 5 people

We lost 3 of our pc’s to last week’s McAfee update bug

We did not know what had happened and the last thing you suspect is the system designed to protect you – bit like an employed bodyguard turning round and shooting you!!
Anyway we employed a company to sort it out and they had to reinstall the complete system in each machine

This cost us nearly £300 – we are having to buy the complete office suite and have lost all of our data bases – so potentially thousands.

All I am asking back from McAfee though is the cost of the repairs.

They have refused!!!!
The only support I get is remote
Here is the conversation

GoToAssist (09:28:29):
Thank you for contacting McAfee Consumer Support. How can I help you?

Customer (09:29:21):
we were effected by the update virus last week and paid over £300 to have 3 of our machines sorted out – is mcafee going to pay for this – we are a new company?

Benjamin (09:29:30):
John, I am more than glad to assist you. Your service request ID for this chat session is 493898306.

Customer (09:29:52):
how are you going to assist?
Customer (09:31:03):
hello……………………………

Benjamin (09:32:19):
As I understand your concern, you would like to know if McAfee will compensate your expense for having your computer repaired, am I correct?

Customer (09:33:02):
Yes we did not know what had caused the problem and employed a technician to sort it out

Benjamin (09:33:20):
I do understand your frustrations and on behalf of McAfee, please accept my deepest apologies for all the troubles you have gone through.

Customer (09:33:46):
and are you going to pay me back ?

Benjamin (09:34:44):
I regret to inform you that McAfee is not processing a refund for your repair expenses.

Customer (09:35:33):
why not it is like paying for a body guard who then shoots you!
Customer (09:36:25):
I will take this up with all the national papers. we are a new company and can\’t afford this please give me david dewalts email

Benjamin (09:36:57):
I understand how frustrating this issue is to you. In this case, I want to make sure that you get the best attention possible. Would you want my Supervisor to call you back to further discuss things and to help you resolve your issue immediately?

Customer (09:37:10):
yes please

Benjamin (09:38:37):
Please be advised that McAfee Customer Service is available from Monday to Friday, 8:00AM to 6:00PM, British Summer Time.
Benjamin (09:38:48):
Are you located in United Kingdom?

Customer (09:38:54):
yes
Customer (09:40:27):
can I have the email address of Mr Dewalt please Benjamin
Customer (09:40:58):
Who is the CEO in the UK Please

Benjamin (09:42:44):
I apologize we cannot provide that information as policy restricted us to do so.
Benjamin (09:42:59):
You may send your concern through our Postal Address below:
Benjamin (09:43:04):
McAfee Inc
227 Bath Road
Slough
Berkshire
SLI 5PP

Customer (09:43:17):
You are a public company and he is therefore a public figure

Benjamin (09:43:48):
I understand.
Benjamin (09:43:49):
Can you provide us your phone number and your most convenient time so that my supervisor will discuss this matter to you?

Customer (09:44:23):
023 92483991 as provided in the form i filled in!!!!!!!
Customer (09:44:33):
Now is convenient

Benjamin (09:45:47):
I understand. Please be assured that my supervisor will call you immediately.

Customer (09:45:53):
I am not going to rest until I get our money back

Needless to say no one has called back!!

Can you help get them to contact me??

John Waddington

Sales and Marketing Director
Nursery Fresh Ltd
www.nurseryfresh.com

Sonia April 26, 2010 4:48AM

I am terribly angry with Mcafee I still did not get any further help, the only thing I have received is a charge of my account for a never asked renovation of macafee services for one year.
I will cancel my contract forever the only thing I want know is first clear help, second an apology. And no sirs, this sort of mistakes do not happen if things are done well and controls are established.

McAfeeLover April 25, 2010 5:47PM

Mistakes Happens–everyone has done it this time its us.We are with you McAfee.Good work.

Antonio March 8, 2012 12:48PM
Hey, just looking aournd some blogs, seems a pretty nice platform you are using. I’m currently using WordPress for a few of my sites but looking to change one of them over to a platform similar to yours as a trial run. Anything in particular you would recommend about it?

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- Thayza April 25, 2012 7:04PM
  Getting a credit card thgourh these big banks (chase, capital one, etc), though easier and more convenient, aren’t the way to go in my opinion. Go thgourh a credit union instead. CU offer cards on terms that are significantly better for consumers than those issued by big banks. They are generally a better deal: they tend to offer better interest rates, lower fees, and more favorable terms on credit cards.So why do so many people still sign-up with these giants? MARKETING!!!!!!
  
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A Long Day at McAfee

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