McAfee apologises for security update blunder

Measures being taken to prevent future problems.

McAfee has apologised to its users about the faulty update file released on Wednesday which caused crashes in Windows XP SP3 systems across the globe.

Barry McPherson, McAfee's executive vice president of support and customer service, said in a blog post late last night that his team had been battling round the clock to fix the problem and to work with affected customers.

"First off, I want to apologise on behalf of McAfee and say that we're extremely sorry for any impact the faulty signature update file may have caused you and your organisations," he wrote.

"We estimate that the majority of the affected systems are back up and running at this time, and more systems are coming back online quickly."

McAfee has published a SuperDAT Remediation Tool to help customers fix affected systems.

"The tool suppresses the driver causing the false positive by applying an Extra.dat file in folder," McPherson explained.

"It then restores the 'svchost.exe' Windows file quarantined as a result of the false detection."

McAfee is implementing additional quality assurance protocols for any releases that directly affect critical system files in an effort to prevent similar crashes in the future, according to McPherson.

"We also plan to add capabilities to our cloud-based Artemis system that will provide an additional level of protection against false positives by leveraging an expansive white list of critical system files," he said.