Last Friday, McAfee released DAT pattern 4715. Later, users of McAfee antivirus products reported that some of their files were deleted/quarantined by the McAfee product. Some of the files deleted/quarantined include EXCEL.EXE (which is the main executable file of Microsoft Excel).

If you are a McAfee user and your current DAT is 4715, update immediately to the latest DAT file. McAfee has a tool that will recover quarantined files; you may want to use it. McAfee has also provided a list of files (in PDF) that is wrongly tagged by DAT 4715. Here is McAfee’s press release on DAT 4715.

Sources:

• McAfee/NAI rolls bad pattern
• McAfee 4715 DAT False Positive Deletion Reports Follow-up