McAfee Antivirus Problems: Are you affected?

By: | April 22, 2010 | 20 Comments
McAfee Antivirus Problems: Are you affected?

Following on from our earlier report which informed you about the huge problems McAfee are now facing after a flawed update to their Antivirus software, we want to know just how many of you are affected by this.

As reported from Computer World, computer users have been venting their frustrations over the mistake, on the official support forums, which we understand are no longer available at the moment.

Here is one of the statements in which company spokesman Joris Evers posted on the forums before it was taken offline:

“The problem occurs with the 5958 virus definition file (DAT) that was released on April 21 at 2:00 P.M. GMT+1 (6:00 A.M. Pacific).”

Judging by the response from users, this is turning out to be a crisis for McAfee, a crisis that could of been avoided had certain measures been put in place.

Have you been affected by this in any way? Give us your feedback on this.

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  • http://www.europevideo.org Hans

    Hi There,
    I have a small internet company (2 people) and all my computers (5 )are down!
    These are windows XP computers servicepack 3, at this moment the patches from the mcafee site are not working on any of my computers, my company is down for 20 ours now. I am realy sick of this because i have two windows servers running and can't acces them so the service to my customers is down also.

  • Gill

    I've been infected this morning with the xp security 2010 virus. Now I can't do anything. The scan did start but then froze. Now it won't even open for me.

  • Dan

    both my desktop and my notebook computers have been shutdown. Unable to get online to upload solution even if there was one available. Since I am not very computer savy, I will have to pay a software technician to fix the problem.

  • Susan Koster

    This morning, my computer showed all the signs of this problem. As I attempted to repair it, using McAfee instructions, I reached one block after another. My computer will no longer copy and paste, the file I should delete (DAT) will ot give me access, and lots more frustrations.

    Thinking that I have paid for McAfee to keep safe, I am justifably angry at a wosre mess, caused by them with no easy solution. I live on an islnad, and cannot bring my computer anywhere. The instructions provided are clear …BUT…they do not work !

  • andy

    Yes, my laptop went down. Took some time to think it must be the mcafee update. lucky i run two laptop and had the ability to scan the nat and confirm my thoughts. The patch solution works, sorry I have not got the site as working on the reconfigured machine. This is a major f…. up.

  • Jim Harris

    I was affected by this download from Mcafee last night. It has blocked me from connecting to the internet and won’t let me shut down without using the hard shutdown procedure. I have been getting fixes from the internet via my work’s pc. As I am the IT manager for my company I have found this very frustrating. I will get it resolved but at who’s expense. McAfee should give us a year of free subscription for those of us who will still be using their product!

  • Eugenio

    I got hit with this one at 12:15 PM CT Wednesday. I had to reinstall the operating system with Dell support and reinstall all my programs. I charge $75/hour and have lost 2.5 days of work due to this!!!

  • ali

    my computer wont open up on screen just remains blank I agree wit above we should get 1 years free subscription!!! what can I do to fix this problem

  • Vikki

    My computer froze during an extremely slow (14 hours, 29% done) McAfee scan and wouldn't let me close the program or shut down computer. I had to unplug from the wall. Now it appears that my operating system has been deleted and the computer has crashed. I held on the phone for 2 hours and 20 minutes last night before I gave up and went to bed. Still no resolution. I tried to report to their website and can't even send an email message to them. They really need to issue some information to the public since we can't get in touch with them.

  • J Simpson

    I have 3 customers with this problem. I mend PC's for a living and am really pissed off on their behalf as the fixes on that rubbish McAfee website are not working for any of the 3 PC's.It seems pretty obvious that McAfee actually created this virus, but didn't expect it to be sent in this way, rather in a more covert way, to get people to renew their subscriptions. What a bunch of crooks.

  • David

    It seems to limited to only some McAfee products. On the upside, I administer over 800 installs of the small business oriented McAfee Total Protection Service, many/most running WinXPSP3, and none of these have been affected.

  • derek

    I am a home user using windows xp sp3. The issue caused my pc to crash, took it to techguys at pc world same day, they couldn't fix it, couldn't even do a reinstall, basically the pc is done for, I bought a new pc straight away – that's some affect!

  • Susan Koster

    Yesterday McAfee promised a call back, within 24 hours, from Tier 2 personnel. Today they tell me 48 hours, even tough they claim to have "escalated" my status,and, now, my camera software is not working either! So, no internet access, no paste features to correct problem, no ability to restart in safe mode, no access to McAfee files, no active icons on toolbar….They can guarantee to time for callback, so, here I sit, on a remote island, immobilized, sharing someone else's computer. …not happy!

  • Grahame

    I've been unable to access my 2 XP SP3 machines on a wired LAN from a laptop running Vista SP2 since this update. The Vista machine refuses to see the XP ones, although it can ping them. XP can see the Vista but not access it. Yet on the McAfee screen, all machines are visible and marked as 'trusted'. I'm really tearing my hair out over this one!

  • Grahame

    I've been unable to access my 2 XP SP3 machines on a wired LAN from a laptop running Vista SP2 since this update. The Vista machine refuses to see the XP ones, although it can ping them. XP can see the Vista but not access it. Yet on the McAfee screen, all machines are visible and marked as 'trusted'. I'm really tearing my hair out over this one!

  • Graham

    Over here in the UK I received an update this morning (Apr 29 9am BST). Since whatever arrived, I have had no error or quarantine report but my ability to "receive" from the internet has gone. So, if I launch IE 7 I get an empty frozen screen and when I run Outlook it stops at 50% send/receive. All the receive tasks are hung. Have tried disabling the firewall to no avail. Only solution has been to remove McAfee completely so now I'm open to all comers. Not quite what I paid for (which worked by the way) – but what I got through auto updates!

  • heena gupta

    whenever i try to update then it says, failed to intialize common updater system. make sure mcafee framework system is running.mcafee common framework returned erroe 80040154@1

  • http://www.aspiretechnet.com/ Sarah

    I have always had issues with McAffee. We've encountered numerous computers having issues that stemmed from Mcaffee being installed. Even without the bugs it seems to be bulky and frustrating to use on a system. Am I the only one who is encountering this?

  • glen

    Try using proper protection like Kaspersky, not this corporatly pushed bloatware, that is not worth paying for. i have new pc preinstalled with this rubish, there is no way i would buy anything from mcafee again, as I work in IT i have learned my lessions, mcafee just bin it

  • David

    McAfee came with my Dell computer. Several times a warning has come onto the screen saying that unauthorised access has been attempted, and do I want to allow or block this. Not being very computer literate, I said "block", after which nothing much worked, so I undid this, and computer started working again. This has happened several times. More recently, protection just stopped working. This last time, I couldn't get it going again, so I removed McAfee and installed ESET Nod 32 . No virus was found, and everything is working properly.