MUMBAI/BANGALORE,INDIA:IT security and data protection firm, Sophos, is warning that hackers are exploiting a problem with McAfee's anti-virus product that has caused hundreds of thousands of computers around the world to repeatedly reboot themselves, effectively becoming inoperable.
McAfee accidentally issued a detection update yesterday which mistakenly detected a harmless Windows file, svchost.exe, as "W32/Wecorl.a", and caused critical problems on affected PCs.
Hackers, however, are compounding the problem by using blackhat SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques to create webpages stuffed with content which appears to be related to McAfee's false alarm problem - but are really designed to infect visiting computers.
Sophos has identified malicious webpages which appear on the first page of Google results if users search for phrases associated with McAfee's false positive.