McAfee Quietly Fixes Software Flaw

Chris Reimer writes "The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that McAfee fixed a serious design flaw months ago in their enterprise product without notifying businesses and U.S. government agencies until today." From the article: "McAfee said its own engineers first discovered the flaw, which lets attackers seize control of computers to steal sensitive data, delete files or implant malicious programs. McAfee produced a software update in February but described it only as offering new feature enhancements. Many corporations and government agencies are reluctant to update software unless necessary because of fears that doing so might introduce new problems."

What a shock

[AgentRavyn]

There's bugs in software? And they were covertly fixed? Never!

Rumour has it...

[GillBates0]

which lets attackers seize control of computers to steal sensitive data, delete files or implant malicious programs.

...that they used the above said flaw to quietly install the update.

Re:What a shock

[mbadolato]

I think the problem is that McAfee mislabeled the patch as "offering new functionality" rather than "fixing design flaw"

Bah, that's just a semantic (bad psuedo pun?) technicality! "New Functionality: Ownz Blocker - Now limits you from being h4x0r3d"

Good for McAfee!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for McAfee fixing their software flaws quietly. I mean, they shouldn't be such braggarts about it.

Re:What a shock

[Anonymous Coward]

This explains the cryptic message left on many State Department servers last week by unknown hackers: "All your capitalist base are belong to us." However, Senator Ted Stevens explained what it meant: "You see, the Korean hacker guys, they used these tube things on the Internet, it's very complicated. It was probably them... Can you help me, I can't get my iPotato thing to work. Where does the CD slide into this thing? it's so small. Help. Help."