Sunbelt Software Makes Move to Entice McAfee Clients Following False Positive Incident

Security Software provider, Sunbelt Software, is looking capitalize on the misfortune of competitor, McAfee’s, recent “false positive” crisis that has been the talk of the industry and Twitter Wednesday afternoon.

The issue resulted from McAfee security software falsely identifying legitimate Windows files as a threat and causing issues such as system halts to continuous reboots. Computers in companies, hospitals and schools around the world have been effected. The AP reported that the issues forced several hospitals in Rhode Island to postpone elective surgeries and stop treating many non-trauma patients in emergency rooms.

Sunbelt, taking aggressive action in response to the incident, is offering McAfee enterprise customers six months of free maintenance added to any new order placed before June 30, 2010. They are also offering a 50% competitive upgrade program and will provide migration tools to help move customers to their VIPRE Enterprise product and automatically uninstall the McAfee software.

Barry McPherson, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Technical Support & Customer Service at McAfee, in a blog post addressing the incident, claimed the incident affected a very small percentage of their enterprise customer base. “We believe that this incident has impacted less than one half of one percent of our enterprise accounts globally and a fraction of that within the consumer base,” McPherson wrot

McAfee says the issue should only effect systems running Windows XP Service Pack 3 and that update was removed from all McAfee download servers within hours.