'And the reason why it's disgraceful is when you get a false positive like this it becomes as expensive to corporations as if it were a genuine attack.' 'It was just completely disgraceful,' he said. He slammed McAfee for not being sure that the update would work on one of the world's most popular operating systems, Windows XP. 'They've probably taken the safe path and I strongly suspect that the numbers that they had were just a guess and they've now realised it's pretty hard to defend a guess, so we better go with something vague instead,' IBRS analyst James Turner said of the change. The reason for the removal was 'to restate number of customers impacted', according to the blog. 'We believe that this incident has impacted a small percentage of our enterprise accounts globally and a fraction of our consumer base home users of products such as McAfee VirusScan Plus, McAfee Internet Security Suite and McAfee Total Protection,' the blog now states. 'We believe that this incident has impacted less than one half of 1 per cent of our enterprise accounts globally and a fraction of that within the consumer base,' he said.īut today the mention of 'less than one half of 1 per cent' appears to have been modified. McAfee's executive vice president, Worldwide Technical Support & Customer Service, Barry McPherson said on an official McAfee blog yesterday that the problem wasn't widespread.

McAfee has since removed the buggy update code from the company's servers. Affected computers experienced networking problems or repeated rebooting. McAfee has changed its official response on how many enterprise customers were affected by a bug that caused havoc on computers globally.Ī McAfee update released on Wednesday caused computers using Microsoft's Windows XP Service Pack 3 to incorrectly identify a legitimate operating system component as containing a virus.

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