Wednesday, April 21, 2010

McAfee Update Causes your PC to Reboot Forever? Uninstall It Immediately

This has to be the mother of all boneheaded mistakes.

McAfee Inc. confirmed that a software update it posted at 9 a.m. Eastern time caused its antivirus program for corporate customers to misidentify a harmless file. It has posted a replacement update for download.

"We are not aware of significant impact on consumers and believe we have effectively limited such occurrence," the company said in a statement.

That statement has to be the worst ass-covering as well because this is "significant impact"

About a third of the hospitals in Rhode Island were forced to stop treating patients without traumas in emergency rooms. The hospitals also postponed some elective surgeries, said Nancy Jean, a spokeswoman for the Lifespan system of hospitals. The system includes Rhode Island Hospital, the state's largest, and Newport Hospital, the only hospital on Aquidneck Island.

The other third probably had Norton's or Kaspersky or were just staggered for bandwidth. The idea that an anti-virus update puts your computer in an auto-reboot cycle is like something out of the 80s. If I were in the IT department at that hospital I would immediately switch everything over to another vendor and never look at McAfee again. This is after you put each PC into safe-mode so that the anti-virus software doesn't run.

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