ID: IRCNE2012081595
Date: 2012-08-22
According to "computerworld", a buggy update released Friday by security vendor McAfee for its consumer and enterprise antivirus products, left the computers of its customers unprotected and, in some cases, unable to access the Internet.
The incident affected both home and business users, some of whom were still trying to sort out the problems caused by the updates on Monday and Tuesday, according to messages posted on McAfee's community forums and Facebook page.
The problems were introduced by McAfee updates DAT 6807, released on Friday, and the subsequent DAT 6808, depending on which product was used.
After installing these updates some home users started encountering errors when accessing the McAfee Security Center console, which prevented them from performing any action inside the program. Other users experienced a loss of Internet connection on their computers.
McAfee confirmed these problems on Sunday in a technical document that described two possible solutions, both requiring users to update to a newly released DAT 6809 file.
One workaround, intended for users who lost Internet connectivity on their computers, involved uninstalling the product, rebooting the computer, downloading an updated version of the product from McAfee's website and installing it.
The other solution described automatic and manual methods of updating existing installations to DAT 6809. Users who continued to encounter errors after updating to this DAT version were advised to uninstall the product using a specialized tool called McAfee Consumer Product Removal (MCPR) and then install the updated version of the product.
Users of McAfee VirusScan Enterprise (VSE) 8.8.x, the company's flagship enterprise antivirus product, had to wait until Monday for a so-called superDAT hotfix that wouldn't require them to reinstall the product on thousands or hundreds of affected computers.
VSE 8.8 Hotfix 793640 is mandatory and includes the full DAT 6809 package, McAfee said.
Even though the hotfix does not force a reboot, the company recommended that administrators reboot all client systems at their earliest convenience in order to validate that the fix was successfully installed.
This is not the first time that McAfee has issued a bad DAT file. In April, a DAT update for McAfee email gateway security products resulted in system crashes and message scan failures.
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