McAfee AV Security Update Cause Major Disruption To Windows XP

An update from the anti-virus software company McAfee has caused thousands of enterprise desktops, running Microsoft's Windows XP operating system, to crash or reboot repeatedly after administrators installed the update.

According to a statement released by the company, the McAfee virus definition, DAT 5958, which was dished out for the customers of VirusScan Enterprise, wrongly identified a critical Window file as a virus and quarantined it.

This lead to the machines being automatically shut down and when restarted, they were not able to load Windows and kept on rebooting in some cases in a continuous loop.

This buggy virus update has caused a lot of inconvenience for thousands of VirusScan enterprise users who are now not able to work on their systems. 

Expressing regret for the havoc caused by the update, McAfee said in a statement that “McAfee teams are working with the highest priority to support impacted customers and plan to provide an update virus definition file shortly. McAfee apologizes for any inconvenience to our customers.”

The Register quoted a software engineer working in a reputed global IT security company, which offers support for customers platforms, saying that due to the faulty McAfee update, the company has not been able do its job properly.