McAfee Update Breaking Windows XP Machines

Engadget have reported that McAfee is causing big problems for Windows XP around the world at the moment due to their latest DAT update numbered 5958. The new DAT deletes the svchost.exe file causing a false positive to occur in McAfee which in turn, starts a bunch of problems on the computer such as restarts and loss of a networking connection.

The issue at the moment is only effecting corporate clients and not regular users and McAfee have already pulled the DAT file from their servers while they investigate to prevent any more damage being done. If your McAfee server has already download that DAT then it might be wise to delete it and prevent it being pushed out to XP clients on your network.

McAfee is aware that a number of customers have incurred a false positive error due to incorrect malware alerts on Wednesday, April 21. The problem occurs with the 5958 virus definition file (DAT) that was released on April 21 at 2.00 PM GMT+1 (6am Pacific Time).

Our initial investigation indicates that the error can result in moderate to significant performance issues on systems running Windows XP Service Pack 3.

The faulty update has been removed from McAfee download servers for corporate users, preventing any further impact on those customers. We are not aware of significant impact on consumer customers and believe we have effectively limited such occurrence.

McAfee teams are working with the highest priority to support impacted customers and plan to provide an update virus definition file shortly. McAfee apologizes for any inconvenience to our customers

Unfortunately the fix isn’t possible over a network at the moment due to the networking issues the problem causes. With a huge amount of computers getting this problem it appears that it’s going to be a long night for IT teams manually fixing each computer on their network that has been infected.

Via: Engadget

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