As you know, McAfee on Wednesday released a faulty signature update file (DAT file) that caused problems for a number of our customers.
First off, I want to apologize on behalf of McAfee and say that we’re extremely sorry for any impact the faulty signature update file may have caused you and your organizations.
I want to give you a brief update on what has happened since we first became aware of the false detection. McAfee team members have been working around the clock to fix the problem and work with impacted customers. We estimate that the majority of the affected systems are back up and running at this time and more systems are coming back online quickly.
Early Thursday morning (at around 1 AM PT) we published a SuperDAT Remediation Tool to help customers fix affected systems. The tool suppresses the driver causing the false positive by applying an Extra.dat file in folder. It then restores the “svchost.exe” Windows file, the file quarantined as a result of the false detection.
The tool has been successful at remediating the problem caused by the faulty DAT update for multiple customers. The tool itself and more details on how it works are available in our knowledge base. Additionally, we have support team members onsite and on the phone to assist impacted customers.
Of course many of you are asking how the faulty DAT made it past our quality assurance checks. The problem arose during the testing process for this DAT file. We recently made a change to our QA environment that resulted in a faulty DAT making its way out of our test environment and onto customer systems.
To prevent this from happening again, we are implementing additional QA protocols for any releases that directly impact critical system files. In addition, we plan to add capabilities to our cloud-based Artemis system that will provide an additional level of protection against false positives by leveraging an expansive whitelist of critical system files. (More details are available in an FAQ that was published Thursday night.)
Again, on behalf of McAfee, I’m very sorry for how you may have been impacted by the faulty DAT file update and thank you for your continued support and cooperation as we work to remediate the situation.
Barry
Your product is an embarassment, in my opinion.
1. It does not activate
2. Your chat support does not work in Windows 7
3. The chat software does not work in Windows 7
4. When I click the link to install the advanced chat software, nothing happened.
5. This is the first time that I had to install software to activate a chat window
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Mcafee.
P.S. I use trendmicro on my other machine and it work just fine. No wonder the salesman at staples bureau en gros recommended it instead of Mcafee.
I will NEVER again use a Mcafee product and once my subscription has ended I will be looking around for an anti virus/security company which actually cares about it’s subscription paying customers to offer them a phone technical service line NOT a premium one pound a minute rip off service. You have NO IDEA about customer service, and I will be voting with my money and giving it to a company which really cares. Out of principle, I would rather pay DOUBLE what I pay for my mcafee subs for a good security centre with a non-premium support phone line than have to endure your abysmal customer service!
I am a PC support person who repairs home pc’s I have had to assist one of my clients to get their pc working. They had to pay my fee to get their pc working, they had only recently updated to McAfee security.
How many other people have had to pay to get their pc’s etc working? I think my client was unfortunate that her pc updated when it did, I know many other people with McAfee who were not affected.
I am sure McAfee will learn from its mistake in insufficient testing.
McAFee along with other Security products has caused me much work over the years, mainly trying to take them off.
I am sure once those who were effected have been properly compensated this incident will be forgotten.
I know it was an accident but, it was a Major inconvenience and I spent alot of time on line with tech support telling me to try uninstalling McAfee and re-install, Sometime I could not connect to the internet, sometimes My computer would freeze at the starting Windows XP window, I only have McAfee on five computer, I fortunately also run a software called ROLLBACK RX which fixed everything but I still have Updates turned off for McAfee.
The latest news I’ve been given is that a disk is being sent on May 4 that I will recieve two days after that and than we can continue to diagnose the problem. I will have been without my computer for well over two weeks. Should I just go to third party support and send the bill to McAfee?
I am still not up and running and it is going on one week. I have spent over 20 hours of time with tech and no solution yet!!
Worldwide my company has 40.000+ computers, 10.500+ couldn’t be used anymore, most are fixed but too many just don’t work anymore. Now we have to reinstall backup’s, this is so time consuming that we’re likely to lose money this month. The company is going to discuss to go and use a diffrent virus scanner or a diffrent OS like Linux Ubuntu, wich also will cost us time and money. Your scanner always did what is had to do but I’ve read about a leaked document that McAfee did NOT even tested the update.
I think other company’s/people need to look further then McAfee/Windows, because if a big company (ours too) makes one little mistake everything can be ruined.
You probably won’t even read this message and I bet you didn’t even type that blog.
I’ve never trusted McAfee. It is resource hog, expensive and unreliable. I have your site adviser on firefox which I will now remove People, there is freeware out there which is better and deals with clients much better, i.e. Avast, Comodo, AVG, Zone Alarm. To make a stupid mistake like this shows a huge lack of caring for your paying clients and you should compensate those effected financially. Shame on you.
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