McAfee offers recompense to virus update victims

David Heath
Friday, 30 April 2010 14:57

Business IT - Security

In an attempt to repair the damage done by the bungled virus signature file update, McAfee is offering customers a number of sweeteners.

In an announcement on their website McAfee has reiterated its apology for the bungled update last week.

For those unaware of the issue, McAfee's automated update incorrectly identified the file svchost.exe incorporated with Windows XP SP3 as a virus.  Unfortunately, the next step was to quarantine the file.  Windows-based PC's were unable to restart with this file missing.

According to reports, affected Australian organisations included Commonwealth bank, Coles and Virgin Mobile.

McAfee has offered all business customers a complimentary one-year subscription to their automated security Healthcheck Platform, including up to 4 hours of remote consulting to "set up and run the health check, review your policies, server configuration and environment, interpret the results and provide recommendations based on McAfee best practices."

McAfee has already offered all affected customers reimbursement of all reasonable costs in recovering the operation of their computers and said they would extend the security subscriptions of all customers by two years.

This must be costing McAfee a fortune!

As a closing thought on the matter, one might argue that if someone's anti-virus software licence with another vendor was up for renewal, strong consideration should be given to switching TO McAfee.  After-all, the chances of another mistake like this will be extremely low!