McAfee bug hit under 50 Aussie firms
McAfee said that less than 50 Australian enterprise customers were seriously impacted by a software update that sent PCs running Windows Service Pack 3 into disarray last Thursday.
"It wasn't actually that many globally," McAfee's vice president and chief technology officer for the Asia-Pacific region Michael Sentonas told ZDNet Australia. "In Australia the ones that I know had serious impact was less than 50. But that's more than we'd ever want to impact, that's for sure."
The buggy virus definition update caused Windows Service Pack 3 PCs to continuously reboot.
As for compensation, Sentonas said the company was looking at businesses on a case-by-case scenario. "Corporate and enterprise users, as you'd be aware, their environments are a lot more complex, so it's not a simple one-size-fits-all approach.
"What we will be doing is offering impacted customers a customer commitment package, and that will be assessed on a case-by-case basis to include things like upgraded support and possibly some licences," Sentonas said.
"It will be on a case-by-case basis because it wasn't the same issue for every single customer. They had varying levels of impact. And we'll work with them to find the right customer commitment package that suits them."
The security firm would also look at further whitelisting legitimate Windows files.
"We do a level of whitelisting," McAfee's Sentonas said. "Obviously we'll be looking at it in more detail moving forward, but it's quite a good technique to accelerate the scanning times as well as reduce risk of these types of issues."
(Front page image credit: ZDNet Asia)