Sunday, April 25, 2010

“Antivirus update wreaks online chaos” plus 2 more

“Antivirus update wreaks online chaos” plus 2 more

Antivirus update wreaks online chaos

Posted: 24 Apr 2010 04:01 PM PDT

Thousands of PC's worldwide have been left useless by a faulty antivirus update, according to reports.

Users found their computers endlessly rebooting after the update from security firm McAfee confused a Windows file for a virus.

Hospitals, universities, businesses and other non-domestic users of Windows XP were apparently hit by the fault on Thursday.

McAfee quickly released an update to fix the issue, but the damage to their reputation was already done, analysts say.

'It is not often that a security vendor takes out a large number of their clients,' said Rob Enderle of Enderle Group in Silicon Valley.

'Customers don't forget this stuff any time soon. This is going to hurt McAfee,' he added.

The Internet Storm Centre, which monitors the web for problems, had reports of 'networks with thousands of down machines and organisations who had to shut down for business until this is fixed'.

Yet McAfee said it was not aware of a significant impact on consumers.

'We believe that this incident has impacted less than one half of one percent of our consumer base and enterprise accounts globally,' a company statement said.

But one technology blogger was less convinced. Ed Bott tweeted: 'I believe McAfee's statements on this issue are composed of equal parts BS (bt) and CYA (cover your a). Spun, not stirred.'

Hackers added insult to injury by tricking users into visiting fake websites offering fixes - but those who took the bait had their computers infected with viruses designed to steal sensitive information.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

'Antivirus Update Infects Thousands Of PCs'

Posted: 23 Apr 2010 06:19 AM PDT

Thousands of PC's worldwide have been left useless by a faulty antivirus update, according to reports. Skip related content

Users found their computers endlessly rebooting after the update from security firm McAfee confused a Windows file for a virus.

Hospitals, universities, businesses and other non-domestic users of Windows XP were apparently hit by the fault on Thursday.

McAfee quickly released an update to fix the issue, but the damage to their reputation was already done, analysts say.

"It is not often that a security vendor takes out a large number of their clients," said Rob Enderle of Enderle Group in Silicon Valley.

"Customers don't forget this stuff any time soon. This is going to hurt McAfee," he added.

The Internet Storm Centre, which monitors the web for problems, had reports of "networks with thousands of down machines and organisations who had to shut down for business until this is fixed".

Yet McAfee said it was not aware of a significant impact on consumers.

"We believe that this incident has impacted less than one half of one percent of our consumer base and enterprise accounts globally," a company statement said.

But one technology blogger was less convinced. Ed Bott tweeted: "I believe McAfee's statements on this issue are composed of equal parts BS (b******t) and CYA (cover your a**). Spun, not stirred."

Hackers added insult to injury by tricking users into visiting fake websites offering fixes - but those who took the bait had their computers infected with viruses designed to steal sensitive information.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Antivirus fix' crashes PCs worldwide

Posted: 23 Apr 2010 04:12 AM PDT

NEW YORK – Computers in companies, hospitals and schools around the world got stuck repeatedly rebooting themselves Wednesday after an antivirus program identified a normal Windows file as a virus.

McAfee Inc. confirmed that a software update it posted at 9 a.m. Eastern time caused its antivirus program for corporate customers to misidentify a harmless file. It has posted a replacement update for download.

McAfee could not say how many computers were affected, but judging by online postings, the number was at least in the thousands and possibly in the hundreds of thousands.

McAfee said it did not appear that consumer versions of its software caused similar problems. It is investigating how the error happened "and will take measures" to prevent it from recurring, the company said in a statement.

The computer problem forced about a third of the hospitals in Rhode Island to postpone elective surgeries and stop treating patients without traumas in emergency rooms, said Nancy Jean, a spokeswoman for the Lifespan system of hospitals. The system includes Rhode Island Hospital, the state's largest, and Newport Hospital.

Jean said patients who required treatment for gunshot wounds, car accidents and other potentially fatal injuries were being admitted to the emergency rooms.

In Kentucky, state police were told to shut down the computers in their patrol cars as technicians tried to fix the problem.

The National Science Foundation headquarters in Arlington, Va., also lost computer access.

Intel Corp. appeared to be among the victims, according to employee posts on Twitter. Intel did not immediately return calls for comment.

Peter Juvinall, systems administrator at Illinois State University in Normal, said that when the first computer started rebooting it quickly became evident that it was a major problem, affecting dozens of computers at the College of Business alone.

"I originally thought it was a virus," he said. When the tech support people concluded McAfee's update was to blame, they stopped further downloads of the faulty software update and started shuttling from computer to computer to get the machines working again.

In many offices, personal attention to each PC from a technician appeared to be the only way to fix the problem because the computers weren't receptive to remote software updates when stuck in the reboot cycle. That slowed the recovery.

It's not uncommon for antivirus programs to misidentify legitimate files as viruses. Last month, antivirus software from Bitdefender locked up PCs running several different versions of Windows.

But the scale of this outage was unusual, said Mike Rothman, president of computer security firm Securosis.

"It looks to be a train wreck," Rothman said.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
Posted by at

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)