Friday, April 23, 2010

“McAfee antivirus update still causing chaos for Windows XP” plus 3 more

“McAfee antivirus update still causing chaos for Windows XP” plus 3 more

McAfee antivirus update still causing chaos for Windows XP

Posted: 23 Apr 2010 02:38 AM PDT

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Few Answers After McAfee Antivirus Update Hits Intel, Others

Posted: 22 Apr 2010 02:00 AM PDT

After distributing a buggy antivirus update that apparently disabled hundreds of thousands of computers on Wednesday, McAfee is still at a loss to explain exactly what happened.

McAfee says that just a small fraction of its corporate customers -- less than 0.5 percent -- were affected by the glitch, which caused some Windows XP Service Pack 3 systems to crash and reboot repeatedly. McAfee blamed a bad virus definition update shipped out Wednesday morning, Pacific time, which ended up quarantining a critical Windows process called svchost.exe.

By the end of the day, the antivirus vendor still couldn't say exactly what caused the problem. "We're investigating how it was possible some customers were impacted and some not," said Joris Evers, a McAfee spokesman, speaking via instant message. One common factor amongst the victims of the glitch, however, is that they'd enabled a feature called "Scan Processes on Enable" in McAfee VirusScan software.

Added in version 8.7 of the product, this feature lets McAfee's malware scanner check processes in the computer's memory when it starts up. According to Evers, it is currently not enabled by default. However, some versions of VirusScan did ship with it enabled. McAfee's instructions for repairing affected computers can be found here.

A large number of users reported major problems after installing McAfee's bad update Wednesday.

Systems at Intel were knocked offline before the bad update could be stopped, according to Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy. He couldn't say how many PCs were affected, but said that the problem was "significant."

"There were quite a few clients, laptops and PCs [affected]," he said. "We were able to get it stopped fairly early on, but clearly not soon enough."

About 40 percent of machines in Washington's Snohomish County were affected by the problem, according to John Storbeck, the county's engineering services supervisor. "This is a nightmare," he said in an e-mail message.

In Iowa, a local disaster response exercise was disrupted when 911 computer systems crashed, according to Deb Hale a Security Administrator with Internet Service provider Long Lines in Sioux City, Iowa. County IT staff soon started getting calls from other departments --- including police, fire and emergency response -- and began an emergency shutdown of all computers on the assumption that a virus was spreading.

After finishing the exercise, using a radio system for dispatch, participants learned that there was no virus, just a bad McAfee update, Hale said in a blog post. "Thanks to McAfee we were forced to test our response to a disaster while in the midst of a real 'disaster,'" she wrote.

According to reports Rhode Island Hospital, the National Science Foundation, and many universities were affected. Local police and government agencies in Kentucky experienced problems.

The problem took out PCs at about 40 percent of the customers of U.K. IT outsourcing company Centrality, according to Managing Director Mike Davis. "It's absolutely massive in terms of what we're seeing here," he said in a telephone interview as prepared to leave work at 1.30 a.m.

The problem started late in the afternoon, Davis said. "We started getting calls about 4 p.m. U.K. time on our help desk from customers that were having their XP-based machines just reboot seemingly randomly," he said. After realizing that it was happening to several different customers simultaneously, Centrality quickly figured out that the problem had to do with McAfee's update, and started shutting down McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator management servers to keep the problem from spreading. By then, however, several thousand computers had disappeared from the networks it manages.

Because the update knocked PCs offline that meant that there was no easy way to fix the broken computers over the network, so harried system administrators had to either walk users through the repair process or fix the infected machines themselves, one by one.

For many the problem was strangely similar to a widespread virus outbreak.

"This is the worst glitch that I've ever had to deal with," said Ken Whittaker a desktop support technician with a Michigan university that had about 10,000 desktops affected.

Whittaker said that only his VirusScan 8.7 users were hit -- others, using the older 8.5 version, were not.

It's not unheard of for antivirus vendors to mistakenly flag legitimate software with their updates. Criminals have become so good at switching up their code that companies like McAfee are now churning out millions of signatures in a cat-and-mouse game to identify malware that is in circulation. That leads to errors.

Still, that McAfee allowed a major Windows component to be misidentified demonstrates "a complete failure in their quality control process," said Amrit Williams, CTO with systems management vendor BigFix. "You're not talking about some obscure file from a random third party; you're talking about a critical Windows file," he said. "The fact that it wasn't found is extremely troubling."

Williams knows what he's talking about. He's a former director of engineering with McAfee.

Late Wednesday, McAfee's executive vice president of support, Barry McPherson, posted a short note saying that he had "talked to literally hundreds of my colleagues around the world and emailed thousands to try and find the best way to correct these issues."

He didn't apologize to customers but added, "Let me say this has not been my favorite day. Not for me, or for McAfee. Not by a long shot."

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Antivirus Program Goes Berserk, Freezes PCs

Posted: 22 Apr 2010 09:22 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, blunt trauma and other potentially fatal injuries were still 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.

However, 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.

 

 

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Malaysian PC users dodge faulty antivirus update

Posted: 22 Apr 2010 04:48 PM PDT


PETALING JAYA: Malaysian computer users were apparently spared when a McAfee antivirus update went awry on Wednesday, reportedly causing PCs all over the world to keep rebooting.

A check with several businesses and organisations in the Klang Valley by The Star yesterday came up with zero victims.

This could be because local businesses and other PC users depend on other brands of antivirus.

The Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) said its 400-plus computers were not affected. "The operating system on our PCs is not the one targeted by the McAfee update," a spokesman for the organisation said. MDeC is the custodian of the MSC Malaysia initiative.

Software giant Microsoft Malaysia also reported that it was unaffected. A company spokesman said its customer support service did not receive any queries from PC users about the problem.

Chip maker Intel Malaysia declined to comment. The New York Times had reported that Intel Corp in the United States was one of the companies hit by the defective update, according to a ZDNet blog (http://bit.ly/cvSa4c).

Any business or individual affected by the flawed update can get the manual fix from McAfee's website http://bit.ly/akIYik and from Star TechCentral, http://bit.ly/8ZdTwv. McAfee is working on an automated fix for the problem.

Wire service AFP reported that a routine antivirus update from McAfee confused a valid Windows file with a virus on Wednesday, disrupting computers around the world.

It was reported that the problem hit corporate users of Microsoft's Windows XP Service Pack 3 operating system.

McAfee released another update later in the day to fix the problem. But by then, the US-based Internet Storm Center, which monitors web problems, said it had received reports of networks with thousands of downed machines and organisations that had to shut down business until the problem was fixed.

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