Millions of people depend on McAfee antivirus to protect their computers from the latest bad bugs on the internet. Those users never expected that McAfee antivirus would itself become a bug that would lock them out of their Windows PCs.
An update to McAfee antivirus is being blamed for locking users out of their Windows PCs. The update was targeted for the Exploit Prevention module of Endpoint Security 10.2 but the update was somehow not applied properly. Installing this update prevented users from logging back into Windows leading some to believe they had been compromised.
Before the issue with the McAfee antivirus became known, some users were blaming the problem on Windows Update. It also appears that the problem only affected users on Windows ENS 10.2 or earlier with the update to version 9418 in place.
McAfee has acknowledged the snafu and has issued the fix with the update 9419 and users are being told to boot into Safe Mode to install the patch.
What’s worth knowing is that Endpoint Security 10.2 is no longer supported, as McAfee discontinued it on December 15, 2018. Organizations, however, continue to run it on their devices, mostly because the migration to a newer security product is considered a costly transition.
For the time being, it’s not yet known how many customers were affected, but what’s worth emphasizing that the issue isn’t by any means caused by a Windows update. Microsoft rolled out new security updates for supported Windows versions (Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10) on July 9 as part of the monthly Patch Tuesday cycle, but none of the updates are causing locking users out of their Windows systems.
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