New McAfee headache
p2pnet news view | Security:- “We thought we were under virus attack today [Thursday] and cut back on our internet access for a few hundred employees,” said a reader of The Register.
Problem? McAfee.
Again.
“Faulty virus definition updates from McAfee that flagged legitimate JavaScript files as potentially malign caused a headache for some sysadmins,” says the story, going on the false alarm, “which meant benign content was flagged as infected by Exploit-Packed-c-gen,” was corrected promptly by a set of revised definition updates.
But not before causing trouble.
“In response to our inquiries, McAfee issued a statement apologising for the snafu, which it said affected only a ‘limited number’ of customers,” adds El Reg.
McAfee, which recently flagged actress Jessica Biel as a Threat to the Net, still owes p2pnet an unknown amount of money for using us in its advertising waffle without our permission, at the same time falsely claiming p2pnet is a, “distributor of downloads some people consider adware, spyware or other potentially unwanted programs”.
Mind you, it’s been saying that for years and isn’t showing any inclination to put things right.
Or to pay us. 
The Register – McAfee false alert snares innocent JavaScript files, September 4, 2009
Threat to the Net – McAfee shock-horror Jessica Biel report !, August 25, 2009
saying that for years – McAfee targets p2pnet. Again., August 28, 2008
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September 4th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
LOL at pic
September 5th, 2009 at 9:44 am
All of the Antivirus companies, and I do mean ALL, have been marking some files as trojans that
are completely harmless for a while now.
I mean programs like Keygens, and cracks for software that has no malicious feature other than
providing a working key or lifting restrictions from certain programs.
Wherever you stand on the moral implications of such programs isn’t the point.
The point is AV companies are making their own false positives, whether on their own or
at the ‘prodding’ of certain wealthy corporations. It makes trusting any antivirus very difficult,
when any clean software could be marked as a trojan, simply because some corporation
( or government, for that matter ), doesn’t think you should have it. This incident could likely
have been a side-effect of such a marking.
I wonder if Antivirus companies are going to be the next hidden tool against consumers ?
September 5th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Just yesterday, I just had two files in a torrent deleted by Norton because it thought they were trojans. I could live without those two specific files, so I marked them as “Do not download”, did a hash check and finished the torrenting.
Whether these two files actually had trojans is unknown. Norton is supposed to know these things, but enough doubt now exists that I have no idea that it does.
And thus does a product made by a company not necessarily serving the customer’s interests, erode the customer’s trust.
September 6th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
“Just yesterday, I just had two files in a torrent deleted by Norton because it thought they were trojans.”
Live and learn. I use AVG Free and false positives seems to be one of it’s specialties. I learned very early on to always turn off any automated cleaning options so that it always asks me first. Later on I wised up and started using sandboxes (an app like Sandboxie for example, a virtual machine, and/or a separate PC altogether). Thanks to a little bit of effort, viruses don’t stress me out at all anymore. Combined with a little bit of common sense and proper PC maintenance (ie: keeping up with security updates), one should never really get infected. I’ve been using Windows since 3.11 and have only ever gotten one virus, which was partially my own fault due to curiosity. I typed the name of the file into IE and instead of going to the website, IE instead ran the program which was sitting on my desktop. That’s when the other all important must have tool of PC use comes into play… the daily backup!
September 6th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
I had BitDefender thinking a dll from Firefox (Firefox!!) was a trojan… I had to use IE to download FF again :’(
Another time, it recognized a harmless, four-year-old game add-on as a trojan. It was stupidly hard for me (a paying customer) to get them to answer and fix the problem in a timely manner.
I’m downloading Avast! when BD’s license expires, thank you very much.
September 6th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
@ Patricia:
I’ve been using Avast for years. AVG is pretty good, too.
Cheers!
September 27th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
“McAfee issued a statement apologising for the snafu”
Snafu? Heh… Situation Normal: All F@cked Up.