A flawed McAfee antivirus update today crippled an unknown number of users with Windows XP on their computers.
A company spokesperson said the company was aware that a "number of customers have incurred a false positive error due to incorrect malware alerts on Wednesday, April 21," adding the problem occurs with the 5958 virus definition file (DAT) that was released today at 6am US Pacific time.
"Our initial investigation indicates that the error can result in moderate to significant performance issues on systems running Windows XP Service Pack 3."
According to the spokesperson, the faulty update has been removed from all McAfee download servers, preventing any further impact on users.
"We are not aware of significant impact on consumers and believe we have effectively limited such occurrence. McAfee teams are working with the highest priority to support impacted customers and plan to provide an update virus definition file shortly. McAfee apologises for any inconvenience to our customers."
According to reports the flawed update did not affect PCs running Vista or Windows 7.
The company has published a workaround for the problem that can be found at http://vil.nai.com/vil/5958_false.htm
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