Bad McAfee Update Takes Down PCs

An update to antivirus software for corporate customers of McAfee Inc., caused much difficulty for customers running Windows XP with Service Pack 3 installed. The company has released a statement via it's blog saying:

In the past 24 hours, McAfee identified a new threat that impacts Windows PCs. Researchers worked diligently to address this threat that attacks critical Windows system executables and buries itself deep into a computer’s memory.

The research team created detection and removal to address this threat. The remediation passed our quality testing and was released with the 5958 virus definition file at 2.00 PM GMT+1 (6am Pacific Time) on Wednesday, April 21.

McAfee is aware that a number of customers have incurred a false positive error due to this release. Corporations who kept a feature called “Scan Processes on Enable” in McAfee VirusScan Enterprise disabled, as it is by default, were not affected...

Guess it's damage control time! I'm amazed that this sort of thing doesn't happen more frequently considering the frequency of updates issued and the nature of the files that are potentially affected.

Microsoft Releases Free Antivirus In 4 Countries

Microsoft Security Essentials beta, a free antivirus software, was available for download on Tuesday to those running Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 but only if you reside in the U.S., Israel, China and Brazil.

According to the CBC "Microsoft bills the software as providing "high-quality protection" against both viruses, Trojans, worms, spyware and other malicious software. It updates and upgrades automatically."

The software will apparently be made available to Canadians when the final version of the software is released to 19 countries during the second half of this year.

AVG 8 Runnig Up Numbers On The Web

The Register is reporting that the latest edition of AVG's antivirus software is running up page counts all over the Internet. AVG 8 includes a new malware scanning service that checks links returned by search engines and advises users whether or not the site is safe to visit. According to this article, AVG estimates that 20 million machines have upgraded to the new version of the software and those users are racking up a pile of hits, "traffic has spiked as much as 80 per cent on some sites." "A situation like this where there is in effect false traffic, where something is generating what is bogus data, leads to wrong budget decisions and marketing activities," says Barry Parshall, director of product management at WebTrends, a popular web analytics firm. "I completely get the value proposition [of Linkscanner], but it would be responsible of them to identify themselves, with agent code or whatever it might be, so legitimate businesses can serve their customers properly."