It has come to our attention that McAfee's family of antivirus products is currently using a majorly broken set of antivirus definitions and finding false positive in several portable launchers and lots of other software.
Current affected products include:
- The PortableApps.com Platform
- Pidgin Portable
- GIMP Portable (I can't confirm this, VirusTotal says GIMPPortable.exe is fine by McAfee)
- OpenOffice.org Portable (I can't confirm this, VirusTotal says OpenOfficePortable.exe is fine by McAfee)
- and others
There is currently no way to submit false positive reports to McAfee as their WebImmune system is also broken (unable to create accounts or send out password reminders on existing accounts).
For users, McAfee's defaults aren't the best and it has already deleted your affected portable app without prompting you. Your data is unaffected and simply reinstalling will have the app working again.
UPDATE: After about 40 minutes on the phone, have a contact at McAfee and have sent a report in. Will update with progress.
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Thank God, McAfee don't make life support systems.
Good work Mr Haller!
how long it'll take them to get off their backsides and actually fix their database.
I used to love McAfee, but I've got to say, that's soured a lot lately. Too many false positives (and heck, I'm not even a McAfee customer anymore - I'm not affected by this - so how frustrated must the actual users be!?!)
"The question I would like to know, is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. All we know about it is that the Answer is Forty-two, which is a little aggravating."
Thank you John, you take very good care of your PAc users. I trust your software more than I do McAfee. I had a message about Pidgin for the first time, I updated McAfee last night, it flagged it as soon as I started up the PC today.
McAfee released updated definitions which fixes the issue:
Platform scan: http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/e718fda274108d08139adb9cffe396a53bf4d...
Pidgin Portable: http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/8284f87445f623d7c7aeb375621c375ab7456...
A submission has already been made to F-Secure for their new issue.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!