Don't update McAfee to 5958

[Aethec]

It seems McAfee is trying to copy BitDefender in destroying their users's systems : http://www.neowin.net/news/mcafee-update-is-locking-users-out-of-their-systems-do-not-update33

If someone on the forum is using it...don't update !

[ident]

a couple of quotes from our forum

 

"Anyone know of any virus's hitting corporate firms right now on XP systems? we are fully up to date with all patches and have had roughly 200 computers shutdown without warning across Europe."

 

"wow, virus has disabled safe mode and is also stopping computers from booting once infected!

 

We are starting disaster recovering procedures to move out of London lol"

 

"Control panel has also been disabled under local admin:/ cannot get anything working eevn under safe mode.

 

Looks like all computers may need to be re-imaged and a move like this would cost the companies millions and will also make us breach contract with other businesses."

 

"ok it looks like it was caused by "mcafee". They have ****** computers world wide and there is no fix.

 

Bye bye mcafee. http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-3999026.php"

[Andavari]

All the av's have issues either major like McAfee's newest problem to those which are little and annoying.

[CTskifreak]

MaximumPC article here. Good job McAfee. Not. I've never trusted them.

 

AJ

[abu aufa]

AVG did then Avast, Bitdefender and now McAfee

 

No to Avira yet

 

How to fix,below :

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=8656 or

http://cosine-security.blogspot.com/2010/04/mcafee-dat-5958-fix.html

[Andavari]

Download.com has posted how to fix it, must be done manually though on each Windows XP system though:

http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20003106-12.html

[wmcintosh]

Local news channel: virus protection caused world-wide problems

[hazelnut]

Seems like svchost was seen as a baddie

 

Anyway real life affect of it here.....

 

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?n&storyid=8671

[Andavari]

Seems like svchost was seen as a baddie

svchost has been seen as a "baddie" before by various software, as has explorer.exe, etc., for doing something "suspicious."

 

I find it so interesting that anti-malware software doesn't have the checksums of the default Windows OS files in some .dat file that are either automatically installed with the software, or created during the very first comprehensive system scan. That way if a false positive is detected the scanner can simply look in it's checksum database to determine it may be a false positive and then automatically request to send the fp to the mothership for further investigation.

[pwillener]

When I noticed this topic a few days ago, I went and checked my McAfee DAT version, to see if I had that "bad" DAT on my system. To my surprise I found that I had an old DAT (5937 I believe) despite the fact that I noticed McAfee auto-updating every day.

 

I went to download the manual update installer, but it wouldn't run - it would give me a lengthy message about being unable to run this install package. Googling the message I found that McAfee is no longer updating VirusScan versions older than v8.5 after March 31!

 

I went to check all of my other systems, and - yes - all had the latest DAT version of March 31!

 

I find it unbelievable that McAfee would do such a thing, without the software giving the slightest information about that to the user!

 

I have been using McAfee VirusScan on all my machines since Windows 95, and I never had a problem with it. But now that's it; I spent this past weekend uninstalling McAfee from all machines, and replacing it with an alternate antivirus software.

[ishan_rulz]

When I noticed this topic a few days ago, I went and checked my McAfee DAT version, to see if I had that "bad" DAT on my system. To my surprise I found that I had an old DAT (5937 I believe) despite the fact that I noticed McAfee auto-updating every day.

 

I went to download the manual update installer, but it wouldn't run - it would give me a lengthy message about being unable to run this install package. Googling the message I found that McAfee is no longer updating VirusScan versions older than v8.5 after March 31!

 

I went to check all of my other systems, and - yes - all had the latest DAT version of March 31!

 

I find it unbelievable that McAfee would do such a thing, without the software giving the slightest information about that to the user!

 

I have been using McAfee VirusScan on all my machines since Windows 95, and I never had a problem with it. But now that's it; I spent this past weekend uninstalling McAfee from all machines, and replacing it with an alternate antivirus software.

Why are you still using McAfee, my friend? Go for Avira I do not intend on starting a heated discussion on which AV is better. Just a suggestion here.

[pwillener]

Why are you still using McAfee, my friend?

As I wrote in my post, I have uninstalled all McAfee products from all my systems.

 

I tried AVG, but it caused severe problems on one of the Japanese XP machines, so I eventually went for Microsoft Security Essentials, which appears to do its job in a very unobtrusive way.