McAfee anti-virus not working

April 25, 2010

Users of the various McAfee antivirus solutions have been hit with a double whammy this week.  It first started last Wednesday when a faulty update file caused any Windows XP with Service Pack 3 (SP3) to crash. But to make matters worse, hackers were very quick to exploit the problem by posting solutions on how to fix the issues.  However the sites in question are riddled with malware compounding the issue.

"It's bad enough if many of the computers in your company are out of action because of a faulty security update, but it's even worse if you infect your network by Googling for a fix," explained Graham Cluley, Senior Technology Consultant for Sophos.

Alot of these dangerous pages are appearing on the first page of Google when people are trying to identify a fix for the issues.

McAfee has released a SuperDAT Remediation Tool to help customers fix affected systems but it also added "We estimate that the majority of the affected systems are back up and running at this time, and more systems are coming back online quickly."

Whilst this may be true in a corporate environment, I doubt many home users have any form of viable backup.

Do you need to review your backup strategy?