McAfee works 'too actively'

Last week, McAfee antivirus security application surprised users when viewing Microsoft Excel and some other applications as viruses.

Joe Telafici - executive director at McAfee's Avert Laboratory - said the cause was due to an error in the virus definition file released last Friday.

This error makes the McAfee security application recognize MS Excel as well as some other applications that are called W95 / CTX.

Specifically, McAfee detected and listed two Excel.exe and Graph.exe files - two parts of Microsoft Office, Adobe's AdobeUpdateManager.exe are viruses.

"Not long after we released the virus identifier release, we received many notifications that the user had found an unusual amount of W95 / CTX virus," Telafici said. "Those files will be deleted or placed in quarantine depending on the configuration on the user's computer."

There were about 100 of our customers informed about this issue, Telefici said. We soon recovered the error and the customer was automatically transferred to the old virus definition file before the new update was issued.

This problem primarily affects McAfee antivirus software for desktops.

McAfee has released a new virus identification update list to fix this issue.

For security software, this error is called "negative test" (false positives) and this error occurs quite often. McAfee often has to issue a virus list update once every three months due to this "negative test" error.

HVD