Scammers embrace McAfee fiasco to pitch fake AV

Scammers have quickly piggybacked onto news of a buggy McAfee antivirus update that clobbered thousands of computers, security researchers said today.

Early Wednesday, McAfee released a flawed signature update that wrongly tagged a crucial system file in Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) as malware. After the software quarantined the "svchost.exe" file, thousands of PCs, most of them in businesses, crashed and rebooted repeatedly.

Firms are still dealing with the aftermath, with some companies forced to manually reconfigure hundreds or even thousands of systems.

The debacle made news not just in the technical press, but in more mainstream outlets, including the New York Times and USA Today.

:story: Full story: Computerworld