No escape for McAfee as hoodies taunt over false positive

The first day at London security conference Infosecurity was hijacked by a group of hooded men taunting insecurity firm McAfee over the false positive incident that recently rendered PCs inoperable.

Yesterday morning, about half a dozen men arrived at the Earls Court conference wearing black hoodies with a message on the back which said "You're only meant to blow the bloody virus up", an obvious reference to the Italian Job movie.

On the front of the hooded jumpers it said 'DAT 5958', a reference to an update that the firm released last Wednesday which resulted in the 'blue screen of death' and DCOM errors after applying it.

This affected Windows XP SP3 users, with the post update security scan recording false positives and misdiagnosing machines as affected with W32/wecorl.a malware.

When asked where they were from, they refused to say. But suggestions were that it could be rival vendors or even businesses affected by the update.

Security companies were united in sympathy for McAfee, as this was a mistake that could have happened to any of them. McAfee has since offered to fix the PCs affected by the problem.

"I don't think it's appropriate for a company to snigger and chortle at what was an unfortunate incident for McAfee and their many customers," said Sophos security expert Graham Cluley, who witnessed the jokers first hand.

"I did wonder whether they had been sponsored by a security company, or a bunch of guys from a company that got hit. I have no idea, because they had no affiliations with them."