In recent days -- and every so often in the past -- manual updates to VirusScan will succeed, but will also display text that makes it appear that the update has failed. In fact, it would be difficult, seeing the message that is displayed, to think that the update had succeeded.

Fortunately, this message is a false alarm and we think we just figured out how to prevent it from displaying; we hope this "fix" will take effect with the 5571 DATs to be released on 1 April 2009. [No, this is not an April Fools joke.]

But whether or not our fix works:

So long as your DATs (virus defs) are current -- created no longer than one day ago -- you may safely ignore such errors. The current version at U-M is listed at http://virusbusters.itcs.umich.edu/download#um_version and McAfee lists its most recent at http://vil.nai.com/vil/DATReadme.aspx (leaving our site) (though this may be a bit behind -- they usually release new DATs before this URL is updated).

We do not release new DATs until we have checked them, so rest assured that any other problems reported in the update process are actually false alarms. Usually these spurious problems go away when we release the next set of DATs, but not always.

[You can check the current DAT version by right-clicking the VirusScan shield in the System Tray (near your clock) and selecting "About VirusScan Enterprise"]

This "error" message you receive is due to a problem with the McAfee autoupdate repository at the time we made a "mirror" of it. The problem refers to a McAfee product we do not license, so there is no cause for concern. [Unfortunately, it is difficult to hack the repository files to remove the products we don't license, so we just image the whole thing, regardless.]

Here is an example of the sort of text you might see when you get such an error; this particular case is for a product called "SpamKiller" -- this is the most common case we've seen, but occasionally we do see it for other products we don't license (e.g., "MASECORE" or "Mase_Det.mcs" , part of "McAfee Anti-Spam Engine", another McAfee product):

Verifying SK_det.mcs.

Downloading SK_det.mcs.

File SK_det.mcs is corrupt. Downloading complete file again.

Error occurred while verifying SK_det.mcs.

Updates were not applied because the update process encountered an 
unknown error:  SPAMSAFE1000.

File SK_det.mcs is corrupt. Downloading complete file again.

Update Finished

Closing the update session.

Unable to find a valid repository.

Closing the update session.

Again: so long as you have the current DATs, this false alarm is no cause for any concern.

NOTE: Under normal conditions, you'd see this only if you were doing a *manual* update. While I do recommend that you check from time to tome to make sure that your DATs are current, remember that VirusScan checks for updates *automatically* at a random minute each hour, so there's no need for you to be watching over the update process. [Updates come out once per day, including weekends, and "as needed" for emergency situations. But "more than once per day" is rare.]

   -BPB

If you'd like to pass this information along to others, I suggest that you provide a pointer to this URL (http://virusbusters.itcs.umich.edu/vs_update_errors.html)

For virus or hoax info, please see our main page (http://virusbusters.itcs.umich.edu/) or go to another reputable site, like The Urban Legends Reference Pages.

by Bruce P. Burrell (bpb@umich.edu)
for the U-M Virus Busters (virus.busters@umich.edu)

virus.busters@umich.edu

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