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Thursday, April 22, 2010

Massive Manual PC Cleanup Expected After McAfee Error

News reports and Twitter chatter suggest thousands of Windows PCs in large organizations around the globe were thrown into fits of rebooting yesterday after antivirus giant McAfee distributed a routine update carrying an egregious error.


Now each one of those computers will have to be manually cleaned. Affected organizations can expect to expend a minimum of 30 minutes of manual labor per PC to get each one back into working order, says Steve Shillingford, CEO of tech forensics firm Solera Networks.


"There's no way to automate the process," says Amrit Williams, CTO of security management system company Big Fix. "It will take however long it takes to touch each single machine. The companies affected by this could be dealing with this for days or weeks."


In a blog posting late Wednesday, McAfee executive vice president Barry McPherson said "less than one half of one percent of our enterprise accounts globally" were affected. "McAfee teams are working with the highest priority to support impacted customers," he says.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

never did like macafee, for home use avg is fine, and its free

Anonymous said...

I do not use Macafee, I use Vipre but my Vipre did the same thing and now all of our computers were affected.
It changed the setup information for our Comcast email. Changed the smtp to stmp and changed the outgoing email numbers.
Once we were on the phone with Comcast for about 1/2 hour, we were finally able to send out email again.
Did not affect the incoming though.