McAfee Anti-Virus Causes Widespread File Damage

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () bsf-llc com>]

McAfee Anti-Virus Causes Widespread File Damage 
Posted by Roblimo <http://roblimo.com/>  on Monday March 13, @09:02AM
from the who-can-you-trust? dept. 
 
 <http://it.slashdot.org/search.pl?tid=172> Security
<http://it.slashdot.org/search.pl?tid=218> IT 
 
AJ Mexico writes, "[Friday] McAfee released an anti-virus update that
contained an  <http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/2802> anomaly in the DAT
file that caused many important files to be deleted from affected systems. 
 
At my company, tens of thousands of files were deleted from dozens of
servers and around 2000 user machines. 
 
Affected applications included MS Office, and products from IBM (Rational),
GreenHills, MS Office, Ansys, Adobe, Autocad, Hyperion, Win MPM, MS Shared,
MapInfo, Macromedia, MySQL, CA, Cold Fusion, ATI, FTP Voyager, Visual
Studio, PTC, ADS, FEMAP, STAT, Rational.
 
Apparently the DAT file targeted mostly, if not exclusively, DLLs and EXE
files." 
 
An anonymous reader added, "Already, the SANS Internet Storm Center received
a number of notes from distressed
<http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1184> sysadmins reporting thousands
of deleted or quarantined files. McAfee in response released advice
<http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_138884.htm> to restore the files. 
 
Users who configured McAfee to delete files are left with using backups (we
all got good backups... or?) or System restore."

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