McAfee Trojan Alert Slaps in MS Office Live

McAfee has apologised after an antivirus update released on Monday evening incorrectly identified a plug-in for Microsoft Office Live Meeting as a Trojan horse.

The signature file update mistakingly marked LMCAPI.exe (a component of Live Update) as a Trojan horse called Swizzor. As a result the component was improperly removed from thousands of personal computers in a huge multinational staff who informed us of the problem, but requested anonymity. Technicians at the company had to deploy new versions of Live Update, as well as an updated signature file that avoids the false alert.


In a statement, McAfee said the snafu affected only a "small percentage" of its business customers.

The issue was quickly identified and corrected for signature on Tuesday released on August 5, with any customer contact McAfee before the release of the correct signature is considering a new DAT file that deleted this incorrect identification.

McAfee Avert Labs aims to maintain a high level of precision and proactiveness in its generic detection for signatures and minimize false positives, while making the necessary corrections as quickly as possible. McAfee would like to apologise to any customers affected by this problem.

If the anti-virus signature updates are a generic problem of all security vendors from time to time. Examples earlier has been included an update on Kaspersky quarantined Windows Explorer, AVG mourn wolf in Adobe Reader and, more recently, both McAfee and CA decided that the legitimate JavaScript applications are malignant.

Here are three examples of a problem that we have written about many times in the past and for which no ready solution is apparent. The effects vary depending on the environment and miss diagnosed request, but can work for anything, since the automatic deletion of a component that nobody loses a locked-workstations in the worst case, which fortunately are rare.