McAfee has antivirus file update problems

McAfee has antivirus file update problems

World’s second largest provider of Anti-Virus solutions McAfee reported that one of their recent definition updates to their antivirus products caused the company’s consumer and enterprise antivirus products to flag Microsoft’s Excel, as well as other applications on users’ PCs, as a virus called W95/CTX.

This means that a lot of users discovered that a lot of critical files on their systems suffered from viruses. Luckily, the problem was reported back to the company fast and it was fixed in a couple of hours.

Joe Telafici, director of operations at McAfee’s Avert labs, said in a statement on this security glitch: “At about 1 pm PST we started getting reports that people were seeing an unusual number of W95/CTX infections in their environment. Files that we did identify would probably be deleted or quarantined, depending on your settings.”

The flaw affected Excel.exe and Graph.exe, two Microsoft Office components, as well as other software, including AdobeUpdateManager.exe, which comes with Adobe Acrobat application. However, this flaw only affected the desktop antivirus software and not the McAfee’s network-level products that scan e-mail.