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Virus Definition Error Causes McAfee Flags Excel as a Virus Together with other applications	By Tudor Raiciu, Technology and Science Editor 13th of March 2006, 13:10 GMT Adjust text size:


The programming error that caused Norton Antivirus to be tagged as spyware was nothing compared to McAfee's catastrophic Friday one, when an update to the anti-virus applications aimed at consumers and enterprises led to the flagging of Microsoft Office's Excel application and others as the W95/CTX virus. "At about 1 p.m. 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," Joe Telafici, director of operations at McAfee's Avert labs, told CNET News.com. According to the McAfee official, the files affected by this were Excel.exe, Graph.exe, and other applications, including AdobeUpdateManager.exe. The only good thing about this, if you can call it good, is that the application reported the virus only when a manual or scheduled scan was performed and not in the idled mode. The error was caused by the definition file 4715, available on Friday at 10:45 AM PST, and the file 4716, available around 3:30 PM, corrected the problem. Unfortunately for the users and companies who had a scan planned, and the default setting was "delete the infected files", the error was irreversible. Here are some comments made by users on RealTechNews.com regarding the effects of the error. "This "BAD" dat file deleted hundreds of thousands of executables on our network, took the entire business down. Excel was the least of our worries.Releasing a good dat file a few hours later was pointless, because it doesn't put the exe's back. This is not the end of this story, believe me." "This bad dat quarantined more than excel. It quarantined random Dell Openmanage files, random compaq files, Brightstore Arcserve CA files, and it looks like their new dat still has not correct false positives in certain SWF files. Fortunately we have a brilliant programming team that were able to write us a script to restore the files to their original location! I think this story will have more teeth to it on Monday."

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