Rapid Web News

A recent automated update to McAfee Anti-virus software caused the software to mistaken detect a key Windows system program as malicious and move it out of its proper location to a McAfee anti-virus quarantine. Due to the critical nature of the quarantined system program, ‘svchost.com’, affected computers failed to start correctly and were sent into a rebooting loop.

According to Microsoft, the affected file ‘is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries’.

McAfee responded to the problem by withdrawing the definition update and later releasing a clean one. The security giant also published advice on how to manually fix affected computers. The influx of interested parties trying to look up this advice through McAfee’s forum caused the site to become unavailable for a short time on Wednesday evening.

Source: The Register

McAfee had the following to say on the matter.

McAfee is aware that a number of customers have incurred a false positive error due to this release. Corporations who kept a feature called “Scan Processes on Enable” in McAfee VirusScan Enterprise disabled, as it is by default, were not affected.
Our initial investigation indicates that the error can result in moderate to significant issues on systems running Windows XP Service Pack 3.

The faulty update was quickly removed from all McAfee download servers, preventing any further impact on customers. We are not aware of significant impact on consumers.

We recommend the use of ESET Anti-virus products including NOD32 Anti-virus and the Smart Security Suite. If you are interested in a secure, reliable anti-virus and computer security solution for you business, please feel free to contact us for more information.

So us techies here at Rapid Web are always kicking around fresh ideas on a daily basis, usually trying to find new and more interesting ways to push hardware to the max and some days were just puzzled as to how you grow seedless grapes but when we have a good idea the general feeling is to push it as far as we can. Like these guys ESet they’re a company that makes one of the best anti-virus solutions on the market today, in our opinion, it’s one of those quiet little invisible programs that you forget you’ve installed until you get a dialog box in the corner advising you that the funny movie clip your downloading where a little cute cat falls of the back of the sofa is actually a Win32 variant of a particularly nasty virus! Not only does it let you know but it then proceeds to just quarantine it and BINGO! You haven’t done a thing and yet your PC is safe! Perfect!

A lot of anti-virus solutions on the market will constantly myther you and I mean constantly would you like to update now? There’s a virus on your PC what should I do? Your anti-virus will run out in 4 months click here to renew… blah blah blah we’ve all been there right? Surely all anybody wants from an Anti-virus package is software that can update itself, doesn’t need 30 minutes of configuration, 2 hours of updates and then lets the virus on the PC and can’t remove it! What’s the point in paying £50 for that?! May as well leave the PC alone and take the missus out…

We have been an  ESet partner now for a couple of years so we can give you this great antivirus software at a very good price - even cheaper than going direct!  so if you need some piece of mind then give us a call and we can have you up and running in minutes.  If your not sure an would like to try it out first well you can download a free trial version from ESet or we can provide a copy too.

Good times,

Clay