I Am Sick of False Positives on SWF files and no way to exclude them!!

[mcafeesb]

McAfee have known about false positives on SWF files for the best part of a year now and STILL we have no fix. Furthermore, multiple forums on the web have raised this issue along with the fact that users cannot easily exclude these files from being quarantined by McAfee.

I'm getting sick of this and I've finally had enough.

The only way I've been able to get round this has been to disable McAfee (what a stupid thing to have to do!), restore the files and offload them to a USB stick for use on another laptop which, thankfully, has a security product which gives me, the user, far better control and is more highly thought of in the IT community.

My family has 6 Desktops/Laptops protected by McAfee and as soon as the licences run out onm each one I'm switching them all to an alternative. McAfee plainly just won't listen to its community, so congratulations McAfee, you've lost another once-loyal customer.

[exbrit]

I've never had that issue.  Did you try submitting the files?

That said, we have been asking for file exclusion for years to no avail I'm afraid.

Message was edited by: Ex_Brit on 23/01/10 7:34:27 EST AM

[mcafeesb]

I know a few people who have submitted files to McAfee but as the problem continues to be widespread and to repeat itself, that is plainly not the solution. A quick search on google shows how many people hit this issue and also how many software packages get trapped in the same way - even big names such as Rosetta Stone Language courses have been rendered unusable by this problem.

I have checked all the quarantined files by running them through other AV software on other machines (Norton, Kaspersky, Eset NOD32 and AVG)  and also through the online 'VirusTotal' service which tests against 40 different anti-virus software products. McAfee is always the one which consistently returns false positives with SWF files.

However, the real crux of the issue is, as you say, that "we have been asking for file exclusion for years to no avail I'm afraid". I think this seems to sum up McAfee's approach to customer service.

The sad thing is that in many other ways this is obviously a good product (heck, I wouldn't have installed it on 6 machines if I didn't think otherwise). Finding false positives is better than missing real ones. But when there is no way for you to tell the software that a file is OK, something which customers have been asking McAfee to sort for years, then it reflects very badly on McAfee.

This may all be symptomatic of McAfee's focus on Enterprise business diverting its energies away from the consumer market. If this issue was a one-off, I wouldn't be bothered but it's happening more & more of late and without the ability to 'whitelist' a file, the product becomes more of a hinderence than a help.

So, it will be another vendor for me, my machines and for the recommendations I make to family & friends in the future.

Message was edited by: mcafeesb on 23/01/10 09:28:17 CST

[exbrit]

I'm inclined to agree with much that you say.  All I can say is good luck and we will keep plugging with requests to be able to ignore detections.