NEW YORK (AP) – 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.
Details are somewhere on the internet but I lost the link. Sorry.
I wasn’t. Because I …. well, never mind.
H/T: Somebody, deleted email by accident. Sorry.
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Supposedly it was a corporate version update, not a general user update.
I experienced it on a cluster machine earlier today. Oddly, the other machine in the cluster did not have the issue. I didn’t even realize that this was a non-local problem until I saw the news reports a few hours later.
McAfee screwed up big time with this one.
Most networked computers at my university were down today, but not my lab desktop. I haven’t updated my antivirus in years and have never had a problem. Not opening random, questionable files from the dark corners of the internet seems to be a pretty good anti-virus solution.
McAfee and Norton are worse than viruses, imo.
Greg, I couldn’t follow your link for more details since I don’t have a scienceblogs admin account. (Methinks the link is wrong.)
And another of the cow-orkers switched his company machine to Linux in large part because he can’t afford to waste several hours a week while the IS crew take it over for virus scans etc.
a normal Windows file as a virus
This is news?
For people using McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) the update that got automatically downloaded and applied (what ePO is supposed to do) looked at the start like a really bad worm. The file svchost.exe was the one that got marked as a virus and quarantined. My understanding (perhaps incorrect) is that it is the main way Windows starts up services, which is how various functions are enabled, like the network stack, USB ports, etc. At my job 7 of us spent about 3.5 – 4 hours touching all the PCs in the building getting things fixed. People were talking about shorting McAfee stock that day.