Havoc descended on mission-critical stores across the globe this morning after their cash registers were knocked out by a botched McAfee anti-virus update. The routine anti-virus update confused a valid Windows file with a virus, disrupting millions of computers around the world.The registers running Windows XP that were affected couldn't be operated and there were a number of stores that actually had to be closed because there were too many registers down in those stores for the store to be able to trade.
Universities, hospitals and businesses were among those reporting problems after the update misidentified a valid Windows system file as malicious code and caused computers to continually reboot.
The problem hit corporate users of Microsoft's Windows XP Service Pack 3 operating system, according to McAfee, which released another update later in the day to fix the problem and urged customers to download it.
The Internet Storm Centre, an initiative of the SANS Technology Institute which monitors problems on the web, said "the affected systems will enter a reboot loop and lose all network access".
The centre said it received reports of "networks with thousands of down machines and organisations who had to shut down for business until this is fixed".
The McAfee software slip "pretty much took Intel down today", said analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group in Silicon Valley.
Enderle told of being at the computer chip titan's headquarters in Northern California for an afternoon of meetings when laptop computers began crashing around him.
"Much of Intel was actually taken out," Enderle told AFP. "I imagine most companies running Intel and McAfee were literally taken out."
But McAfee's head of global support, Barry McPherson, said the company believed less than one half of 1 per cent of its enterprise accounts globally were affected.
From BrianSeekFord - How to fix the McAfee SVCHOST crash from the virus definition update
It turns out, that they put in a bad signature that quarantines your SVCHOST.exe which could cause your explorer to crash. Good times, right?
So, the fix is pretty easy:
1 Restart into safe mode with networking
2 open a Command window. If your explorer isn't started, hit CTRL - ALT - DEL and hit Task Manager. Hit File, run. CMD.EXE and enter.
3) type DEL C:\Program Files\Common Files\McAfee\Engine\avvscan.dat
4 type cd c:\windows\system32\dllcache
5 type copy SvcHost.exe ..\
6 Restart your PC. You are good to go!
Recommended reading:
* Best anti-virus quick scanner
* AVG Anti-Virus Falsely Detects User32.dll As A Trojan