The Phish Alert Who Cried Wolf - McAfee Anti-Virus Calls Legitimate Sites Phishy, Also Freezes Computers and Locks Programs   - 3,176 Views, 5 Comments

“McAfee has detected a potential phishing Web site. Phishing sites appear to be legitimate, but they request you to provide sensitive information, which can be used to commit fraud. McAfee recommends that you block this Web site,” says the alert.

This of course means that not only will the people getting the erroneous McAfee alert not go to the website, but the website will get a bad name. Perhaps even worse, once people realize how bogus many of the alerts are, they will start to ignore the phishing web sites alert altogether. It’s the phishing alert that cried wolf.

Separately, but relatedly, the latest upgrade of McAfee VirusScan Enterprise is causing headaches for people who run Lotus Notes.

Explained one IT administrator who wished to remain anonymous to CyberTechHelp, “The upgrade locks people out and is causing Notes errors where we can not even restart Notes, but need to reinstall,”, adding that the demand for help with McAfee and Lotus Notes was “higher than normal.”

This is by no means the first time that McAfee has caused such problems or misidentified good elements for bad. Earlier last year, an update of McAfee misidentified dozens and dozens of executable (.exe) files as malicious, leading to the quarantine and deletion of many necessary and sometimes even critical files. For example, McAfee misidentified such innocuous files as excel.exe and adobeupdatemanager.exe as malicious files. Lesser known but equally useful files such as usersid.exe and imjpinst.exe - both standard Windows XP files - were also flagged as bad guys needing quarantine.

What’s the lesson here?

Well, obviously the issue here is the need for such measures on your computer, and how they may conflict with other programs. Having too many antivirus programs on one computer can cause a problem as well.

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If you aren’t prepared to upgrade to a different computer, many people whom I know and respect in the PC world swear by Computer Associate’s eTrust Antivirus program, which sure beats swearing at McAfee!