McAfee Epically Fails: Tens of Thousands Suffer

[MyNameDidntFit]

Well, well, well. Yet another reason not to use bloated, expensive commercial anti-virus software. Early Wednesday morning, McAfee released an update to its widely used anti-virus software. No big deal there... except, well, they fucked this up worse than I could have imagined:


McAfee's latest update caused the software to attack the crucial Windows svchost.exe files, resulting in widespread crashing and repeated rebooting throughout its users.


http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim//2010/04/21/virusscanalert.jpg

The update was available for four hours before being taken down, but the damage had been done and vital systems in hospitals, universities, police stations and other institutions -- not to mention homes and businesses -- were temporarily bricked. Epic fail.



Source (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-20003074-83.html).

[MotherGraham~]

Chuckled. I never used McAfee because it never appealed to me. Friends told me it wasn't that good. But regardless, epic fail indeed.

Why not go with Avast! or AVG? Pretty good ones IMO.

[MyNameDidntFit]

Avast! and Avira are good. AVG, Norton and McAfee are... not.

[Jason]

AVG used to be really good, then about a year back they started to go down the tubes. I switched to Avira a while back, and I've been really impressed. I've never ever trusted antivirus software made by large companies, because the more hands you've got in the pot, the bigger the chance one of them is going to screw up like this.

[MotherGraham~]

Avast! does report a lot of false positives in comparison to AVG though. At least, so most claim.
AVG used to be really good, then about a year back they started to go down the tubes. I switched to Avira a while back, and I've been really impressed. I've never ever trusted antivirus software made by large companies, because the more hands you've got in the pot, the bigger the chance one of them is going to screw up like this.
I suppose that's true. I haven't tried Avira myself, but if it has such positives reviews, I might as well check it out soon.

[Lance]

Oooo - I've been looking for a replacement to AVG (been really annoyed with them lately)

I may give Avira a shot

[Konrad]

McAfee isn't the worst but this is lols. My favorite AV of all time would have to be Kaspersky though.

[Jason]

The ONLY irritation I have with Avira is the damn pop-up you get after it finishes the daily update which encourages you to subscribe to their premium version. It has a habit of minimizing game windows, which isn't a problem in EVE Online or Company of Heroes, but in Team Fortress 2 it can lead to repeated mouse abuse.

Beyond that, I have to say it's entirely faultless.

[MyNameDidntFit]

Personally I just use Microsoft Security Essentials because it's intrusiveness is zero and, well, the AV I rely on most is in my head.



AVG is a reasonable anti-virus, but it uses an ungodly amount of resources for the job it's doing, same with most of the large, commercially available AVs.

[Conor]

Best Anti-Virus ever = Sophos

Probably the longest one going, and it's never had retarded fuck-ups like McAfee just had :P

[JustaBitOutside]

I work at a hospital, this crashed all of the computers in the east coast of the US. Now that we have gone over to all electronic medical documentation, you can see what a major F-up this was.

[Jason]

yowch. That's pretty horrendous contingency planning by whoever was in charge of that one. :-/

[JustaBitOutside]

Yeah, I mean there is a backup plan of course, but it's not a smooth transition that's for sure. They got it up and running in a day, but it was back to the old pen and paper, and getting on the phone all day long. I like Avira the best as far as antiviral software.

[Steph]

Oh shit so maybe I should switch then ...

I have really had no problems with McAfee and thank God my PC never downloaded that.
But y'know it came with the new internet I just got and it updates it monthly for free so I thought why not ...

I had Kaspersky a few years back ... it was the only AV that I actually saw doing something.