Anybody else get bit by this?

[bjoehandley]

http://news.techworld.com/security/...e-still-causing-chaos-for-windows-xp/?olo=rss

McAfee antivirus update still causing chaos for Windows XP
Blue screen of death for McAfee users
By Ellen Messmer | Network World US
Published: 10:09 GMT, 23 April 10

One day after security vendor McAfee sent out a bad antivirus update that crippled corporate and consumer Windows-based computers, the suffering wrought by the update, DAT 5958, continues.

McAfee apologised for the faulty update and has supplied what it calls a SuperDAT remediation tool and DAT 5959 to wipe out and repair the damage done by DAT 5958. But if McAfee's own community discussion site is any indication, getting rid of the bad McAfee code, which can blue-screen Windows computer and cause other disturbances, hasn't been easy.

"I assume that like me, everyone is in repair mode right now and getting machines running is their top priority," wrote one individual under the name CrazyFingers. "However, after this is over, I expect McAfee to have some straight answers for me. I expect them to explain clearly how a mistake of this magnitude managed to happen in the first place. Then I want to know how it slipped past QA. Finally, I have lost a lot of faith in McAfee's products. I need them to show me why I should continue to use their products when the largest and most destructive virus outbreak we have had in 8 years was actually caused by my A/V vendor."

Another commenter on the community site wrote, that 5958 "is nuking all of my systems and detecting a false positive in svchost and causing a system shutdown."

McAfee - which says about .5% of its corporate customers and even fewer of its consumer customers have been impacted -- continues to call the bad antivirus update its "false-positive issue."

McAfee's public response has mainly been provided by Barry McPherson, McAfee executive vice president of support, whose blog posting earlier detailed how he has spent 14 hours straight on the phone with McAfee's support group

Subscribe to Techworld newsletters McAfee isn't the first antivirus software vendor to have wreaked havoc on customer PCs with a bad antivirus update. Trend Micro delivered a bad antivirus update two years ago, and vendor AVG also had a bad antivirus update that year. But McAfee's handling of DAT 5958 this week is meeting with frustration from customers who are bewildered by technical explanations from McAfee and long wait times — one online commenter claims 2 hours —for tech support.

"Upon calling McAfee's Gold Tech Support, we were met with waiting over 2 hours FOR AN OPERATOR!!," wrote one individual on McAfee's comments section. "While we understand a higher than normal call volume for an event like this, we were completely taken aback that we had to dig deeply to find information regarding this issue on your Web site. We certainly would have expected to see something, anything on the main page of McAfee…nothing."

Another wrote: "Not enough time to figure out what all the geeky terms like DCOM, DAT and SVCHOST means. I'm not a geek so I took the laymans way out and deleted the whole enchilada." And one commenter simply called it, "the McVirus."

 

[AIbandit]

Nope but my girls friend did. She ended up paying 90$ for a remote tech to fix it.
She didn't know it was Mcafee causing it either.

 

[goodburbon]

Nope, Mcafee is crap. Every machine I've ever worked on that was hosed beyond repair with malware had Mcafee.

 

[LostSoul]

Nope, Mcafee is crap. Every machine I've ever worked on that was hosed beyond repair with malware had Mcafee.

x10000 :badpc:

 

[wolfpackjeeper]

Nope, Linux boxes don't blue screen

 

[H8PVMT]

AVG FTW....and a horribly slow computer

 

[crazyjim]

Anti-Virus software sucks... all of it. A good firewall and a smart user and I haven't had a virus for 5+ years.

 

[XJLI]

OSX ftw.

McAfee sucks, Norton is a system hog.

AVG or Avast free edition goes on every computer I service at school. Working on campus on ppl's computers who use them primarily for facebook and porn I see many a bug.

 

[vincepru]

OSX ftw.

McAfee sucks, Norton is a system hog.

AVG or Avast free edition goes on every computer I service at school. Working on campus on ppl's computers who use them primarily for facebook and porn I see many a bug.

x2 on the OSX. knock on wood i havent had an issue with my mac since ive had it! my PC was a constant problem

 

[tbburg]

X3 on OSX. Mac OS might not be the most secure OS ever written, but with market penetration below 10%, it's a small enough target that nobody tries to hit it, which means we don't have to bother with the virus crap(yet).

 

[AIbandit]

Mine stays pretty clean. I try to Reformat alot anyway so viruses are no big thing.
I've been runnning Norton internet security 2010 which works surprisingly well.

 

[bjoehandley]

AVG FTW....and a horribly slow computer

We've run into that with the McAfee and the old tower, drives my Mom crazy that it took so long to start up. That's some of the reason this tower will get some hop ups in the next few weeks.


Since I can still get stuff off the old tower, how do I transfer my iTunes from that one to this one?

 

[kastein]

Huh, didn't affect my FreeBSD box at all...

Caused chaos at work though, so many people's systems were down that they put an announcement saying THIS IS NOT A VIRUS over the PA system. Was pretty funny. Luckily I'd been pressing the "delay for another hour" button all day on the update, so by the time I updated they had fixed the DAT file.

 

[NW-ZJ-SCOTT]

Kaspersky FTW

I hated mcafee with a passion. free or not, It was a system hog itself. and didnt block a damn thing!

 

[bjoehandley]

Huh, didn't affect my FreeBSD box at all...

Caused chaos at work though, so many people's systems were down that they put an announcement saying THIS IS NOT A VIRUS over the PA system. Was pretty funny. Luckily I'd been pressing the "delay for another hour" button all day on the update, so by the time I updated they had fixed the DAT file.

Had it been Dad or myself using the computer at the time, that's exactly what would have happened. Unfortunetly Mom had been using the computer and it just shut down and rebooted on her, after that everything went to hell

Turns out this also deleted the drivers for the USB ports too, so we can't get anything off the tower at the moment either:banghead: I may have to see if I can either get the fix it program from McAfee or somehow hook the Sony's HD up to the Dell computer long enough to get everything onto a temporary HD or on the Dell's, if not both:badpc:

 

[kastein]

You should be able to get the Sony's HD connected to another PC for data recovery. I keep one of these in my emergency kit: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=2020-OTB&cat=CBL

It comes with everything you need, just plug it into the drive, plug the power brick into the drive if needed (desktop HDDs usually need it), plug the USB cable into any computer, and it should pop up as a removable drive so you can access the files. Unless the computer you're using is ancient you shouldn't even need to use the install disk.

EDIT: you probably can do without this just by pulling the case off the other computer and installing the drive in it but I find it much easier to do it with this adapter, keeps me from screwing up the master/slave jumpers and I don't have to take the case off my PC.

 

[bjoehandley]

Dad mentioned something about that kind of thing, we may have to try and get one if the MCAfee disk doesn't do anything.................

 

[GhostDakota]

I don't run virus protection on my PC. My firewall and network are setup well enough that I usually don't need it. I've been running like this for 4+ years without issue. ;-)