10 May 2001
McAfee falsely reports Sophos distributed a virus
In the early hours of Wednesday May 9, at 00:30 GMT, Sophos
issued an email alert to its customers regarding the VBS/VBSWG-X worm (also
known as the Homepage worm).
Sophos technical support has received a large number of calls
from users of the McAfee anti-virus program claiming that our email
alerts (and even a subsequent press release) were infected by the
virus (which McAfee called VBS/VBSWG.gen@mm).
Sophos would like to reassure its customers that it did not send
out a virus, and the report by McAfee's software is erroneous.
Some versions of McAfee's virus-scanning product were false
alarming on entirely innocent virus descriptions from Sophos.
Sophos has learnt that users of McAfee Scan products with DATs
prior to 4137 need to upgrade the DATs to avoid the false
alarm.
As this has caused considerable confusion, Sophos recommends
affected users contact Network Associates technical support for
further information.
As a service to affected users Sophos is providing a link to the
McAfee website from where the fixed DAT file can be downloaded:
http://download.mcafee.com/uk/updates/updates.asp
About Sophos
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.