McAfee messed up on Friday - anti-virus update flags hundreds of legitimate prog

Last week McAfee messed up terribly. They launched a new virus definitions file for their anti-virus package on Friday but apparently something went wrong as the anti-virus scanner suddenly began to flag hundreds of legitimate third-part programs as hostile and prompting users to delete or quarantine them:

The files identified by McAfee as malicious included excel.exe (Microsoft Excel) and gtb2k1033.exe (Google Toolbar installer), as well as programs that run Macromedia Flash Player, Sun's Java application and Adobe update manager.

The erroneous flags even apply to updaterui.exe, McAfee's own update program. The full list of programs errantly marked as bad is here in PDF format, although McAfee only lists the ".exe" files affected, not the names of the software packages.

More info at Washington Post.