March 13, 2006 McAfee Update Wrecks Havoc By Gregg Keizer Courtesy of Page 1 of 2 For over five hours Friday, McAfee's anti-virus software erroneously flagged hundreds of legitimate executables as a malicious virus, leading some customers to quarantine or delete the offending files and render applications such as Microsoft Excel inoperative. An error in McAfee's daily virus definition (dubbed "DAT") identified the files as W95/CTX, a first discovered in 2004. All editions of McAfee's on-demand-scanning products, including both the enterprise and consumer versions of VirusScan, were affected. Among the legitimate files painted as were Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet, Adobe's Flash, the Google Toolbar installer, several Adaptec drivers, and parts of Sun Microsystems' Runtime Environment. The list that McAfee posted of the affected files numbers more than 330, but even so, the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center called it incomplete. "It doesn't include any of the binaries that have been reported to be affected by some of our readers," one of the analysts wrote on the site Sunday. Depending on how users had configured VirusScan, the harmless files were either quarantined to a special folder or deleted. In either case, applications were broken as files were moved or erased from hard drives. The flawed DAT went out at 10:35 a.m. PST Friday, said Joe Telafici, director of operations at McAfee's AVERT Labs. "About two hours later, we started getting reports of large numbers of files identified as W95/CTX," he said. McAfee pushed out a corrected DAT a couple hours after that, at 3:28 p.m. PST. By then, however, it was too late for some McAfee users. E-mail This Story Print This Story Page 2: next page Page 1 | 2 Get the latest Messaging news, product info, and trends every week.			Spyware And Adware Continue To Plague PCs FTC Smacks Spammer With $900K Fine IM: Real-Time Securrity Problems For Financial Services Bot Herders Ready Attack Against Message Forums Researchers Warn Of Coming Tax Scams Microsoft Vows To Keep Pressure On Phishers     Messaging Pipeline's Main RSS Feed     Messaging Pipeline's Blog RSS Feed Editorial and vendor perspectives The Six Flavors Of Windows Vista Microsoft plans to release a full six-pack of Vista versions, one for every taste. Which Vista will be right for you? Hope is Not Enough When It Comes To Compliance Three Ways To Authenticate E-Mail And Stop Spam Wikis In The Workplace Review: Google Desktop 3 Vendors are now talking about how collaboration can be improved by integrating video with messaging applications. They're even talking about adding live TV to mobile phones. How far do you go before it becomes a bandwidth and business productivity drain? Video is a great idea     13% Video is fine but there needs to be size limits     25% It's never used for anything really productive     38% I draw the line at live TV     25% In search of messaging products? Check out our brand new Product Finder for a directory of groupware and collaboration tools, security products, archiving solutions, and more.