McAfee to reveal reimbursement plans this week

Compensation for McAfee's Australian customers impacted by last week's flawed signature update will likely come directly from the security vendor, rather than partners.

McAfee will outline reimbursement plans for customers impacted by the April 21 signature update - which crashed thousands of Windows XP SP3 systems - online by Friday.

But, Michael Sentonas McAfee's CTO for APAC told CRN that he believes customers will be reimbursed "directly." 

McAfee this week said that it will reimburse customers at a "reasonable cost incurred" when repairing the computer.

For Home and Home Office users McAfee said it will extend user's subscriptions for an additional two years free of charge.

Sentonas said McAfee will "proactively "communicate with partners through email "so they know what they have to do".

"Obviously end users will either go to McAfee or the partner they bought the software from, so we want to make sure they're fully aware of what they need to do.

"We're making sure our partners understand where to go and understand how they fix this," he said. 

Sentonas asked affected users to visit the McAfee website first. "It has all the latest information on how to deal with the issue," he said.

Sentonas said it's "too early" to determine how much the reimbursement will cost McAfee or how many Australians were affected.

The issue impacted machines running Windows XP SP 3 running Viruscan 8.7i with non-standard settings.

"Off the top of my head I don't know the number of Australians impacted. It's something that we're looking as we call out to our customers.

"But before we start going through the stats we want to make that everybody is back online," he said.