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McAfee Corporate Disaster

Last week the corporate world got a little bit more hectic, at least for those relying on McAfee as their anti-virus software on Windows XP computers.  It seems as though a corporate update that went out created a huge issue with its users computers when it came up with a false positive that deleted the svchost.exe file within Windows XP users.  This of course made the computer crash and restart.  When the computer was started up again, of course it had no networking capabilites anymore since the svchost.exe file handles network traffic on your computer.

McAfee seems to be on the ball with this disaster of an update, informing users that if this should happen there are a few options that you can do to remedy this situation.  The entire article is here if you care to or need to see how to fix this issue, but I will give an overview of what needs to happen.  Basically you need to copy the svchost.exe file from an unaffected computer, take that copy to the affected computer to replace the deleted file, and then proceed to update to the newest definition files so that it wont happen again.  This of course means a lot of staff to go to each and every computer affected to fix the issue, which in some places is around the 30,000 to 60,000 users (http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/21/mcafee-update--shutting-down-xp-machines/).

You would hope things like these wouldn't happen, but they sometimes do and we all have to just basically go with the flow and deal with it.  We take a lot for granted when we use services that are out there to protect us.  They don't always work, sometimes they do more harm than they help us.  This of course could have happened with any anti-virus software, trying to keep up with false positives is a full time job, mind you this scenario is a bit strange since Windows XP and svchost.exe has been around for quite a few years.  But in the long run it wouldn't be that far fetched that it will happen again.  McAfee hopefully learned a valuable lesson from all of this, if it happens again though I doubt people will be so reliant on their service.  Personally I wouldn't poke McAfee with a ten foot pole.