McAfee Anti-virus Becomes A Virus, Reaps Havoc
April 22nd, 2010 - 8:04 pm ICT by Angela Kaye MasonApr 22 (THAINDIAN NEWS) McAfee is still at a loss when it comes to explaining exactly what happened yesterday as thousands of computers were disabled when the “anti-virus” suddenly became a virus. Corporate customers of the anti-virus program were affected by the glitch, which caused some Windows XP Service Pack 3 systems to crash and reboot repeatedly. McAfee stated that the fault was a bad virus definition update which was shipped out Wednesday morning, Pacific time, that ended up quarantining a critical Windows process called svchost.exe. By the end of the day, however, they still could not say for sure just what had caused the problem.
“We’re investigating how it was possible some customers were impacted and some not,” said Joris Evers, a McAfee spokesman, in an instant message. Systems at Intel were kicked offline before the problem could be stopped.According to Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy, the issues were “signifigant.” About 40 percent of the computers and machines in Snohomish County Washington were affected, and the county’s engineering supervisor called it “a nightmare.” In Iowa, a disaster response exercise stopped when the 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. School computers across the US shut down, police were writing reports without the aid of computers, prisons postpones inmate visits, and emergency rooms sent non trauma patients away while elective surgeries were put off in some cases.
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.”
Seems to me maybe we are all just a little bit too dependent on computers…and therefore need a clear cut backup plan for when/if they crash.
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Tags: barry mcpherson, deb hale, disaster response, elective surgeries, emergency shutdown, intel spokesman, internet service provider, iowa county, message systems, response exercise, s engineering, school computers, service pack 3, sioux city iowa, snohomish county washington, trauma patients, virus definition update, virus program, windows xp service pack, writing reports