McAfee false positive bricks enterprise PCs worldwide

by admin April 21, 2010 at 8:08 pm

World of hurt

Enterprise customers of a widely used McAfee anti-virus product were in a world of hurt on Wednesday after an update caused large swaths of their machines to become completely inoperable.

The problem started around 2 pm GMT when McAfee pushed out DAT 5958 to users of VirusScan Enterprise. The virus definition falsely identifies a core Windows file as infected, quarantines it and then shuts down the machine. When restarted, the PCs are unable to load Windows, a glitch that mires them in an endless reboot cycle.

“We support customers’ platforms, and it means we are currently unable to do that,” said the head of infrastructure security for a worldwide IT firm who asked not to be identified because he’s not authorized to speak to the press. “Basically, our engineers are currently unable to work.”

Read more: theregister.co.uk