McAfee's Trojan horse error gets developer's goat

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An Australian software developer is considering suing McAfee after the antivirus company wrongly identified his Internet setup program as a Trojan horse in a recent virus definition update. Mark Griffiths of Brisbane said he is "not ruling out" filing a lawsuit against McAfee even after the antivirus company released on Thursday an update to its DAT virus definition file that fixes the false positive.

Griffiths sells the Internet setup program, ISPWizard, to Internet service providers in more than 20 countries. McAfee antivirus software on ISP customers' computers labeled ISPWizard as the BackDoor-AKZ Trojan horse. Because the McAfee software automatically eliminates the program from the users' system, many were not able to connect to their ISP. Griffiths said he was first notified about the mistake on Sept. 2 by ISPs in the United States. They had been alerted by their customers, who had not been able to access their Internet services. Immediately after being notified, Griffiths sent an e-mail to McAfee but did not hear back from the antivirus vendor until Monday.

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News source: news.com

woops :D

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#1 Chazzza on 11 Sep 2004 - 08:18

roflmao, stupid McAfee, hehe

#2 Jon on 11 Sep 2004 - 09:48

They didn't release new weekly dats early because the problem effected very few users. They DID realease hourly updated dats to deal with it, and very rapidly.

This developer really needs to see the bigger picture.

(5 replies) #3 matric on 11 Sep 2004 - 09:57

You need to get a brain Jon.

#3.1 Jon on 11 Sep 2004 - 12:10

And why is that? I work with McAfee software 37hrs a week, I've probably got a hell of a lot more experience than 99% of the people here.

#3.2 hornetfighter on 11 Sep 2004 - 12:32

but working for McAfee means you cannot possibly present a totally unbiased view

#3.3 Z3r0 on 11 Sep 2004 - 12:47

Hello o/ I feel that mcafee did a good job fixing the mistake, I think the developer needs to chill out as it was only temporary and tbh he's probably doing this for the publicity

#3.4 kitchenutensils on 11 Sep 2004 - 16:40

this dev. must have a stick up his ass - i know it sounds like an important piece of software, but u gotta give mcafee the hand because virus updates are more important than some stupid setup software

#3.5 hosebeast on 11 Sep 2004 - 19:08

hornetfighter, Jon said he works with McAfee software, not for McAfee. Personally, I hate McAfee but I sympathize with them on this issue. It's the same thing as all the little idiots screaming bloody murder that XP SP2 breaks their old obscure app in some minor way. Everybody wants to pretend that Microsoft was secretly trying to disable them on purpose. Every Joe Blow software publisher is acting like Microsoft wants to "Netscape" them. In this case, some nobody wants to believe that McAfee was trying to steal their ISP business. Gimme a break. McAfee made a mistake and fixed it within a reasonable amount of time.

With the number of viruses running around, it's really just a matter of statistics. There are only so many possible combinations of bytes you can have, when you're scanning for a relatively short signature. And if you try to scan for longer signatures to avoid false positives, not only does system performance suffer but it becomes easier for viruses to avoid detection thru minor variations and mutations.

I once wrote a script which got trapped by someone's antivirus because it was set to quarantine ALL scripts regardless of what they did or what they contained. I'll bet if I asked a lawyer, he'd recommend that I sue everybody involved, including the manufacturer of the antivirus author's keyboard and mouse.

#4 diamonds on 11 Sep 2004 - 11:23

and you need a life matric for spending the time to type that when you could be doing other more constructive things

#5 bilemke on 12 Sep 2004 - 00:08

Hmm.. the cost of too much automation.

I never let my antivirus software auto delete/move things.. It has to ask me. Then again, most who had the problem probally wouldnt have known to not delete the file anyway.

#6 psykil on 12 Sep 2004 - 00:54

it's a false positive for @#!$@ sake. it happens. it's fixed. life is happy again. deal with it. i'm sick of these whiny people who think everyone who inconviences them owes them money. for what? you had a bad day? right.

stupid mcafee? what did they do? some trojan's fingerprint turned out to be similar to this devs code. it happens every day. they didn't write the trojan. they didn't write this guy's code. they went about their jobs, you know, BLOCKING MALWARE.

this dev needs to get his head out of his ass.

(1 reply) #7 Ruffneckting on 12 Sep 2004 - 11:16

McAfee are not the only ones to do this a couple of weeks ago I was called out to one of my customers who had a Trojan horse in Dell's media software that comes shipped with there dimension PC's. This was picked up by Sophos. 5 hours later after numerous calls to Spohos and Dell. There was an update that corrected the problem. Now that customer was charged for my time while on site, so these mistakes do cost somebody some money somewhere down the line. No compensation from Sophos has been offered and not even a phone call to say it was a mistake, after loggin 3 calls with there tech support. 5 Hours of my time and my customers wasted!!!

#7.1 amanichen on 12 Sep 2004 - 13:00

There's a difference between dragging somebody into a civil lawsuit for this, and for asking to be compensated for money which you were coerced into spending.

Anybody can sue for Anything in the US -- after all how would we feed all the scummy lawyers in this country? There aren't nearly enough criminal cases to keep them wiping their asses with $100 bills.

#8 kwyjibo on 13 Sep 2004 - 13:39

I sympathize with Mark Griffiths. He's a small developer. His software's entire purpose is to reduce the number of phone calls an ISP receives from end users. He works very hard to this end and THAT is what ISP's pay him for. If ISPs lose faith in his software because of a mistake on McAfee's part, he should be compensated for the lost business they caused him.

McAfee is the biggest pile of **** on the planet, yet they still exist. How?

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