Completely unacceptable

That was what I thought when I saw this post about McAfee’s screw up with the definition files they released Friday morning. It’s completely unacceptable that those def files got released to the public, and that for five hours, the folks who were doing everything we tell them to do in terms of keeping udated, were at risk of having their program files incorrectly identified and quarantined. (Or deleted if they’ve set it to delete infected files.)

One of my duties is keeping up with our laptop pool. Basically, while any of the helpdesk folks can check out or check in laptops that our attorneys borrow, it’s mostly my job to make sure they get updates, both McAfee and Microsoft. Typically I check for updates whenever they get checked back in, since I need to “clean” them after each use anyway. (Remove cookies, Internet history, files that were stored there temporarily, etc.) If any had come back Friday morning, they would have gotten these bad updates, been put away and handed out to an attorney without being checked for updates again. It’s only a matter of luck that I didn’t have any come in and get those updates. It’s not supposed to be that way. We shouldn’t have to distrust the very files that are being used to protect our PC’s from malware. It’s hard enough to do that without McAfee introducing more dangers.

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