For a brief period last Friday, McAfee’s security tools killed more than viruses.

An error in McAfee’s virus definition file released on Friday morning caused the company’s consumer and enterprise antivirus products to flag Microsoft’s Excel, as well as other applications on users’ PCs, as a virus called W95/CTX

Such problems with security software are called false positives and they happen occasionally. McAfee typically has to do an emergency release of a virus definition file once every three months because of a false positive issue, [Joe] Telafici said. “This is our once for the quarter I think,” he said.

However, this time around it was a particularly big goof, because the company faulted Excel, Telafici admitted. “Usually, it is either custom applications or applications that did not exist at the time we wrote the signature file,” he said.

Who got to call Bill and apologize?



  1. Well I agree with flagging MS products as a virus, it just a case of McAfee’s product telling the truth about windows, and MS products for the first time.

  2. gquaglia says:

    It didn’t go far enough, it should have flagged the whole windows OS as a virus…

  3. ranron says:

    I was running McAfee once and it sucked, so I bought Norton the next month and I’ve used Norton for 6 years straight. Now, I just reinstalled everything on a new computer (6 months new?) and I decided that I was willing to risk viruses in return for better performance in games, editing software, etc. It also decreases the boot time dramatically.

    So I’m going to go securityless? No, I’m going to use a hardware firewall and that should be enough for me.

    If all hell breaks loose, I can reinstall everything again as I only run 10 programs: Office, Steam, Firefox, Nero, WinDVD, Azureus, Orb, iTunes, Quicktime, and PGP Desktop.

    I use a flash drive for files, and anything else is easy to download.

  4. Mr. Fusion says:

    ranron

    Good luck


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