Just shy of the two year anniversary of when a McAfee antivirus definition contained a false positive that crippled Windows XP systems around the world, it seems the company is at it again. A McAfee Knowledge Base article describes the issue DAT 6682 is having with McAfee security for certain email products.
McAfee has confirmed that incremental DAT 6682 may trigger message scan failures and a subsequent system crashes in the following McAfee products:
- McAfee Security for Microsoft Exchange 7.x
- McAfee Security for Lotus Domino 7.x
- GroupShield for Exchange 7.x
- Groupshield for Domino 7.x
- McAfee Email Gateway (MEG) 7.x
- McAfee Email and Web Security (EWS) 5.x
McAfee recommends that customers DO NOT upgrade to DAT 6682.
McAfee has pulled the problematic DAT and planned to push the subsequent DAT 6683 after being tested at 5:30PM Central time. The KnowledgeBase article for this issue has a number of workarounds for the various systems affected.
I was able to hear follow-up from a McAfee representative on the DAT 5958 fiasco two years ago and he shared several steps McAfee would be taking to prevent this sort of problem from occurring again. Hearing about another problem of significant severity (taking down corporate email and crashing systems) makes me wonder if any of those solutions were implemented. Fortunately (I guess), I’m now at a Symantec shop and was not directly impacted this time by the DAT problem.
