An Australian software developer is considering suing McAfee after the antivirus company wrongly identified his Internet setup program as a Trojan horse in a recent virus definition update. Mark Griffiths of Brisbane said he is "not ruling out" filing a lawsuit against McAfee even after the antivirus company released on Thursday an update to its DAT virus definition file that fixes the false positive.
Griffiths sells the Internet setup program, ISPWizard, to Internet service providers in more than 20 countries. McAfee antivirus software on ISP customers" computers labeled ISPWizard as the BackDoor-AKZ Trojan horse. Because the McAfee software automatically eliminates the program from the users" system, many were not able to connect to their ISP. Griffiths said he was first notified about the mistake on Sept. 2 by ISPs in the United States. They had been alerted by their customers, who had not been able to access their Internet services. Immediately after being notified, Griffiths sent an e-mail to McAfee but did not hear back from the antivirus vendor until Monday.