Die McAfee...Die.

[Slayerik]

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/22/cnet.mcafee.antivirus.bug/index.html?iref=allsearch

This is my rant post. I have been fixing fucking XP boxes for two days now, I work as desktop support for the U of Mich. They should buy me a bottle. Who else here was fucked by the Mc?

I bet it was a pissed off McAfee employee on the way out, how else does SVCHOST get fuckin' flagged as a virus?

[Jayce]

Maybe others have different experiences, but I've always found McAfee to be a pile of crap.  I dumped it way back in my college days when it was the only package NOT to find my roommate's virus that was spreading over our home LAN. My corporate and educational experiences with it since then haven't been any better.

[bhodi]

It destroyed my entire office. People's desktops have been rebooting since yesterday morning.

It's really the day the virus known as antivirus is seen for what it is.

[HaemishM]

McAfee gave people's computers the AIDS. 

[NowhereMan]

Actually inspired by Stewart's rant on FOX, it's really more computer Lupus.

[01101010]

Now I am kinda glad I got rid of McAfee two years ago...

[Lantyssa]

Yeah, we've been bitching about it in Useless Conversation.

We got lucky in that our department wasn't hit that hard, but I was already exhausted from finishing moving the day before, and I was dressed up for a panel I did in the morning.  I don't normally move about so frequently, much less in heels.  My legs are killing me today and I think I overdid it since my old wrist injury is hurting for the first time in years.

Once I knew how to fix it, things weren't too bad.  But when I had half a dozen machines around me all giving the same symptoms of a hack, I didn't have a lot of time to research it.

Also, I'm glad I've been trying MSSE on my personal machine.  I would have been completely in the dark otherwise.

[Abagadro]

Oh man.  I swapped out McAfee on my XP machine two days ago. Dodged one. there.

[Chimpy]

McAfee is on my "do not install" list because of the fucking destroy your computer's ability to function shit their trial version does when it is close to expiring. I have spent close to an hour on the phone with customers who can't connect to the internet because of that shit multiple times trying to get them back online. Had one girl where it screwed her computer up so badly that fucking safe mode wouldn't let her do some stuff.

[Comstar]

I got the email from McAfee- checked the server and we hadn't installed the broken version. I'd spent all night killing a single motherboard, so am glad I didn't need to kill another 300 PC's the next day.

[Xuri]

McAfee has, along with any Symantec product, long been on my "don't install this software"-list.

[Minvaren]

McAfee : Oops, our bad.

I imagine they have to be moderating the comments there pretty heavily...

[Lantyssa]

How long did it take them to put anything up in a visible place?  This is the heartfelt apology we get?  "Some of you may have been impacted"?

Fuck McAfee.

[Ironwood]

McAfee : Oops, our bad.

I imagine they have to be moderating the comments there pretty heavily...

Allow me :

We cut costs in the QA department and fucked ourselves.

[Sir T]

Well, I'm officially buying Kaspersky on Monday...

[Nonentity]

All of our other offices were hit by it. Thankfully, due to the fact that our automatic update server hadn't been properly grabbing updates for a few days, we actually avoided the kerfluffle at my office, and I was able to apply the hotfix before anyone was affected.

[Slayerik]

Still cleaning up whats left of the 8,000 affected computers. I'm getting fucked up tonight!

[Trippy]

How long did it take them to put anything up in a visible place?  This is the heartfelt apology we get?  "Some of you may have been impacted"?

Fuck McAfee.

This is a good summary of how poorly McAfee has handled this situation:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=2031

It's still true right now that there's only a small link off to the right on the home page that even hints at the problem. Otherwise, it's "business as usual" for the company.

[Lantyssa]

Which is what pissed me off more than that they allowed it to happen.  The fix for something of this magnitude should be front-page in bold.  You could still miss that tiny text when looking at their homepage.

[Righ]

If you rearrange the letters of McAfee VirusScan, you get "sue vaccine farms", which is probably what should happen next.

[Samwise]

If you rearrange the letters of McAfee VirusScan, you get "sue vaccine farms", which is probably what should happen next.

I LOLed.

[Chimpy]

The damage done by this McAfee stupidity is probably more than the damage that would have been done by all of the possible viruses in its definitions combined hitting a corporate network over the same period of time.

I wonder how many customers are going to say to call Dell or HP up and say "If you don't unbundle McAfee from these computers I will find another vendor who will"?

[Xuri]

Very few, because we (as a species) seem to enjoy complaining about issues to our friends, family and co-workers more than we can ever be bothered to actually do anything about those same issues.

[Slayerik]

Hey, I resemble that remark!

[Lantyssa]

I wonder how many customers are going to say to call Dell or HP up and say "If you don't unbundle McAfee from these computers I will find another vendor who will"?

Since this was the Enterprise version, for that to happen the person with the final say-so would have to decide to dump McAfee.  I imagine some departments will, others won't.  The more it impacted their bottom line though, the higher the chances.

For a university setting like a couple of us?  It'll play a factor, but I can guarantee they don't care much that we were inconvenienced.

[Selby]

I am just glad my university switched to Symantec.  Not that it's much better, but at least I was able to be productive this week.

[Lantyssa]

I'd stick with McAfee before using Symantec.

[Selby]

I've honestly always hated McAfee.  I had a similar problem back in 1997 due to some conflict it had on my system, and was put off from ever using their products again.  I used to administer Symantec products and never had any issues, albeit that was back in the 1999-2002 time frame.  The corporate editions I run now don't seem as bloated and horrible as people make them out to be, but my network is quite small at home ;-)

[Khaldun]

My college ITS mandates that students have it. They tried to tell me the other day it had to be installed on my personal laptop in order to access the campus network. I pretty much pulled rank at that point and said that if that's how they wanted it, we were going to have a nice big meeting about whether that was really the policy. Turns out that it's not the policy! My problem solved. Too bad for the poor students.

[Sheepherder]

svchost.exe?

Really?  They quarantined THAT?!?!

[Arthur_Parker]

Does a full scan after the update not trigger the problem?  Our policy (at least on the product I support) is to test new dat updates on a single pc before they are centrally deployed, so I'm kinda confused why other large enterprises would be caught out by something like this, unless it doesn't immediately take effect even on a full scan.

[KallDrexx]

McAfee Offers to Pay for PC Repairs After Bad Update

[Tale]

In the 1990s I wrote about these things for Australia's equivalent of PC Magazine. Norton/Symantec, McAfee and most other well-known antivirus programs were giant piles of annoying bloatware back then, and remain so.

I've always used F-Prot, an excellent antivirus program that simply finds and removes and protects against viruses. Sixteen years of no bloat and no problems: http://www.f-prot.com

[Morat20]

In the 1990s I wrote about these things for Australia's equivalent of PC Magazine. Norton/Symantec, McAfee and most other well-known antivirus programs were giant piles of annoying bloatware back then, and remain so.

I've always used F-Prot, an excellent antivirus program that simply finds and removes and protects against viruses. Sixteen years of no bloat and no problems: http://www.f-prot.com

I use Kaspersky. The ONLY problem I've had with it was a single update that listed my Mozy configuration files as a potential security risk and quarantined it. Which fucked Mozy for like two weeks until I yanked it and reinstalled it. They fixed it within 24 hours, but my configuration was already hosed.

[Samwise]

I use Kaspersky.

 

Nothing good to say about that one.  The best thing it ever did was detect its own installer as malware and delete it.