McAfee turns customers' PCs into spam servers, patch incoming

[Jos]

Update: the patch for the spam issue is now rolling out to customers, and everyone should have the update shortly.

McAfee is promising to patch a vulnerability in its SaaS Total Protection anti-malware service, pitched as a "peace of mind" solution offering "complete email and web protection", after it was found that a flaw within the software was being exploited by spammers to relay their unsolicited messages from users' machines.

The problem was exposed by British art firm Kaamar Limited in a blog post earlier this week, which complained that their e-mails were being blocked by e-mail providers and their IP addresses appeared on blacklists for sending spam.

Apparently McAfee's "Rumor" Service, which is a peer-to-peer file sharing technology part of the anti-malware suite used to distribute security updates within an internal network, allows inbound Internet connections and serves as an Open Proxy on Port 6515, which spammers used to bounce e-mails as if they were coming from that machine. The Rumor service appears to install itself even when not required, and though you can disable it using Windows' administrative tools, it is restarted by McAfee's automatic updates.

Besides having their business e-mails blacklisted by a number of e-mail providers and spam blocking services, Kaamar Limited says the issue caused its site to get the equivalent of 10 months of normal traffic in just one day, and had to pull their product listings from Google Shopping to avoid getting their account suspended.

McAfee said it expects to issue a patch later today after it's finished with testing and clarified that the flaw didn't put customer data at any risk of exposure. The patch will also address another vulnerability that could allow an attacker to misuse an ActiveX control to execute code on a user's computer.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/47104-mcafee-turns-customers-pcs-into-spam-servers-patch-incoming.html

 

[Guest]

Spam-Afee?

 

[Guest]

With friends like McAfee and Norton, you don't need a virus to slow down your computer.

 

[Guest]

Despite the fact that people love to hate Norton, it has NEVER failed me in almost a decade. Over many versions and on many OS it has served me very well. I ried McAfee just once for shiggles and I unistalled it within an hour.

 

[Guest]

It sounds like McAfee should not only patch the software but also provide at least a month of extra support. If you can't trust your "security" software, what can you trust?

 

[Guest]

Just another example of the failure of open systems. In the Droidy world, 65% of devices are infected and there is no way to detect invasions and no way to clean the device. The Windows world is little better with anyone being able to load anything on any device.

Enter the future and it is the Apple ecosystem. Nothing can be loaded on any iOS or OSX device unless it is scrubbed and uninfected by the App Store approval process (only exception is malware loaded through Adobe Flash). This makes the Apple ecosystem the only high security computing environment out there today. Think it is about time to uninstall Flash and boycott all web sites that insist on using it.

By bet is that Microsoft will follow Apple leaving Google out there as the lawless environment of thieves and anarchists. Is Google the king of thieves?

As an IT professional with 30 years experience, I am really coming to appreciate the wonderfully secure environment that Apple has created. Will no longer block Apple devices from the network and will now start pushing them into the enterprise now that I am seeing ultrabooks that cost more than the Apple book and are stripped naked of any software.

 

[Guest]

What a bad joke they are XD

 

[nazartp]

I don't know how they are still in business. After their 2010 fiasco I was hoping they would be sued out of business. Just thinking about damage to the firm I work for: two thirds of computers were not functioning for close to a full day. Rough estimate of 13,000 people twiddling their thumbs instead of working. And I believe we still use them. Not sure if we got this iteration though.

 

[ramonsterns]

Guest said:
Despite the fact that people love to hate Norton, it has NEVER failed me in almost a decade. Over many versions and on many OS it has served me very well. I ried McAfee just once for shiggles and I unistalled it within an hour.

My dad seems to love it for some reason, and since he has two computers at home, he buys the three license one and gives me the extra, so I put it to use.

I remember I had a nasty virus once, I went to contact them on how to remove it, and they told me I had to fork over $100 so some Hindu I don't know from a place I've never been can remotely access my computer without guarantee of fixing the problem.

Eventually I came here and asked for assistance and a kind soul in the forums managed to fix it for me.

I love how you pay a subscription to keep your computer clean, but if their program fails, you have to pay some more to fix what they failed to protect.

 

[3DCGMODELER]

Never had a virus in over 15 yrs.... knock on wood.. yep

Never used virus software, tried it but it would slow my puters and screw em up...

If you now how to set up your computers and filters and use the email servers to check email...

U would never need virus or malware programs...

 

[Guest]

You probably have viruses and just don't realize it, hence you speak out of your neck and southern orifice. Laughable.

 

[Guest]

@3dcgmodeler lies. If you have surfed the internet, you have gotten a virus in that 15 years. Even if you didn't know you did. Which, without AV, how your know you didn't? You don't need to "download" something to get a virus. Browser holes, program weaknesses, unpatched OS's etc etc

 

[MrTomTom]

I wouldn't ever trust Mcafee after all this mess they caused with their "security" software.
I wouldn't trust Norton either since I've had a BSOD right after connecting to the Internet for the 1st time and updating my freshly bought Norton Internet Security software (what a waste of money that was!).
In fact, the only security software I will approve is from Eset.

 

[Guest]

"Despite the fact that people love to hate Norton, it has NEVER failed me in almost a decade. Over many versions and on many OS it has served me very well. I ried McAfee just once for shiggles and I unistalled it within an hour."

You wouldn't really know how well you were served if that was all you used. Norton is the single best way to get the least performance out of the computer you paid for and the single best way to pay the most for protection that has been offered in better form for free for as long as I can remember.

"There's a sucker born every minute" - P.T. Barnum

 

[Guest]

I've tested the performance of various scenarios over the many systems I've had in the last decade with and without Norton and saw ZERO difference in any real world scenario. I've also tried numerous other AV software and while some were solid none eclipsed Norton on any front. Call me a fan boy if you want, but satisfied well informed customer is a more accurate description.

A sucker is born every minute indeed as is a hater born every minute.

 

[TJGeezer]

I wonder how John McAfee feels about what they've done to his company. Years ago, he drove his VW bus around to corporations, showing them how his software stopped viruses before they did any damage. The corporate MBA types would stick their fingers in their ears and chant "la la la la la la" - or they'd accuse him of planting the viruses himself. Once events rubbed the MBA noses in reality, he sold his company to a corporate shark type and I stopped using his software. Free alternatives were coming available by then anyway. So John McAfee worked for years to get corporations to recognize reality and now the company with his name on it is just another corporation. Ain't life funny that way... hope he's catching lots of fish, or having fun in Belize, or whatever he's doing, and laughing at the MBAs who wouldn't believe him and now can't competently run the company he sold them.

 

[TorturedChaos]

Guest said:
Despite the fact that people love to hate Norton, it has NEVER failed me in almost a decade. Over many versions and on many OS it has served me very well. I ried McAfee just once for shiggles and I unistalled it within an hour.

Before I discovered the wonderful world of free anti-virus that do just a good (or better) job than a lot of the paid ones, I used Norton - and it did a pretty good job. I just hated how much is slowed down my poor laptop & how over zealous it was. I would tell the firewall to let an item through, like a game I wanted to LAN with a friend on - but it wouldn't let it thru. I would have to turn off the firewall, then it would yell at me every 30mins that it was off. It was even more obnoxious than the XP firewall...

After using it for about 2-3yrs I gave up on it, and started trying out free antivirus & firewalls - settling on Avast, Comodo Firewall & Spybot S&D - which together use less resources than Norton Security 2004 .

 

[Guest]

OSX's secure because it's waste of time to spread virus on < 5% shares of all OS on the planet.

 

[Guest]

back on topic. our machine was hit at 4pm on 12/30 I know the exact time because malwarebytes threw up a baloon warning. first one, then anoher and another all pointing to myagtsvc.exe as the offending program. network usage never exceeded 1.5% thanks to malwarebytes. It took a few days to nail down mcafee as the cause. With Mcafee customer service connected to our machine, we unloaded mcafee and the warnings stopped, re installed it fresh and the warnings came back. So my only recourse at the time was to uninstall mcafee and put norton in (offered free by comcast). now all outgoing activity has ceased. there are still hits comming in from the rogue, but norton FW blocks them all. urls are from USA and China. Now network usage is 0 - 0.01%. I just wanted to point out that having a second backup like MWB is a good idea. it protected our ISP from becomming blacklisted by keeping the activity low. the interesting thing is Mcafee was called out on this port 6515 vulnerability as far back as 2001 when you do research on google. seems like it was just a matter of time that someone tested it.

 

[Guest]

QUOTE:
''Never had a virus in over 15 yrs.... knock on wood.. yep

Never used virus software, tried it but it would slow my puters and screw em up...

If you now how to set up your computers and filters and use the email servers to check email...

U would never need virus or malware programs...''

^ This ^

 

[Guest]

My last encounter on vista was "windows defender virus." It told me a bunch of programs were infected even an iTunes program (Bonjour). So I did a system restore. That fixed it. McAffee was slowing down my system so I tried Linux. Now I've been using Ubuntu 10.04LTS for quite some time now and my laptop now works even better. No more anti-virus! Plus I made a bootable DVD from it and use it on other pc's.

 

[PinothyJ]

And this is why I gave McAfee the flick: they originally screwed up my system so bad during install that it would always boot-up to a BSoD.

Luckily Trend Micro has been given me good times ever since…

 

[Puiu]

Guest said:
Despite the fact that people love to hate Norton, it has NEVER failed me in almost a decade. Over many versions and on many OS it has served me very well. I ried McAfee just once for shiggles and I unistalled it within an hour.

People who actually know a thing or two about antivirus protection stay the hell away from norton. but norton works just fine as long as you don't do stupid thing on the internet.. as for me i use MSE (the best free antivirus for win7, but i don't recommend it for XP) and kaspersky (best paid one - alongside bitdefender) when i need the extra protection.
Let's not forget that common sense is the best protection you can have.