Viruses are hazardous for computers. Hence, Antiviruses are developed to prevent, control and detect the malware, virus and other hazardous computer programs that can damage the computer components. The market for antivirus manufactures has grown drastically since people have realized the importance of protecting their computers from virus. Expansion of wireless networks tend to contribute to the flow of virus and antivirus helps in detecting such virus and slaying it. But the point of concern is: how much can we trust the antivirus?
This question came into the picture after McAfee's popular antivirus software failed stunningly on April 21, 2010 causing tens of thousands of Windows XP computers to crash or repeatedly reboot. Its application mistakenly attacked svchost.exe, which is the critical component of Windows Operating System. Many consumer voices rose angrily and company’s reputation was in great danger. However, McAfee apologized upfront and conducted a thorough investigation into its mistake and published a FAQ sheet that explained more completely why they had made such a big mistake and which customers were affected. The two important points of failures were that no notification or warning was given to users before deleting svchost.exe and McAfee’s automated quality assurance testing failed to detect such a critical error. The company said that they had not included Windows XP Service Pack 3 with viruscan version 8.7 in the test configuration of operating systems and McAfee product versions. This reason was not found considerable as XP SP3 is the most widely used desktop PC.

As a customer, these reasons would take away my trust on McAfee’s products. But I believe mistakes happen and the deal is to analyze and correct the mistake. McAfee accepted its mistake and rectified the error by removing and replacing the faulty DAT file, version 5958, with an emergency DAT file, version 5959 and has posted a fix for the affected machines in their consumer knowledge base. Their quick action for