The Security Mentor

In case you've been living in a cave (and these days I don't blame you if you do), today's news is that an update to McAfee's antivirus product went berserk and misidentified many legitimate programs and components as viruses. Many companies were brought to a halt by the ensuing "friendly fire" incident.

Other antivirus companies have had incidents like this, but none so bad.

Set your antivirus to "quarantine" files it doesn't like, or if you're certain you know what you're doing set it to warn you about them. I've never set my antivirus software to delete files, and all the McAfee customers who did set it that way were very, very sorry today.

Have good backups no matter what.

Research your antivirus software. The "market leader" isn't necessarily the best. People who buy from "market leaders" bought cars from General Motors in the 70s and 80s. Some antivirus firms are coasting on reputation while rotting inwardly like GM did. An anonymous writer who claims to be a former McAfee employee says

I am forced to use McAfee where I work now, but it is coming off all of my home systems until I am convinced that they have cleaned up their QA practices and put product quality ahead of shipping "On Time".

There are some decent free antivirus programs but I don't know of any that allow you to use the free version in a business. Among commercial programs, Kaspersky has been well regarded but has had an embarrassing rash of security problems lately. I'm using NOD32, which has an annoyingly cryptic interface but a stellar rate of detecting new viruses, which runs efficiently even on an older laptop, and which most importantly doesn't ^*&*&$%@! get in my way