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McAfee Antivirus Tool Blocks Internet Access
From: InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>
Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2003 01:00:04 -0500 (CDT)
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1212162,00.asp By Dennis Fisher August 6, 2003 Some Network Associates Inc. customers are up in arms over an update for one of the company's antivirus products that is preventing them from accessing the Internet. The problem is caused by an update for McAfee VirusScan Professional 7.0, the company's flagship enterprise antivirus application. When update 7.03 is installed on some machines running Windows 2000 or Windows XP, it prevents the PCs from connecting to the Internet after the suggested reboot. The problem seems to be affecting customers who upgraded from 7.02 to 7.03. McAfee has pulled the update from its download servers and is performing quality checks on it, according to information on the company's Web site, but has not provided customers with any instructions on how to fix affected machines. "I am so angry with these people it's palpable. I write software and cannot believe they released a patch before thoroughly testing it," said Michael Shohoney, a VirusScan user who said his PC was down for more than six hours before he was able to restore the Internet connection. A spokeswoman at NAI, based in Santa Clara, Calif., said she was unaware of the problem and would look into it. Some users report that uninstalling the troublesome patch and reverting to the last known good version of VirusScan restores their Internet connectivity. However, others say this hasn't worked for them. A McAfee technical support representative writing in the site's help forums said that the company believes the problem lies in a DLL that controls the Hostile Activity Watch Kernel (HAWK), a feature that looks for malicious and "virus-like" behavior. - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomo () attrition org with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.
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