McAfee crashes millions of computers, Swedish alcoholics outraged and thirsty

AiR

Forum Addict
Joined
Dec 19, 2005
Messages
11,985
Location
Suecia
Car(s)
Bulgogi Knedliky 1.6 GDI (Hyundai i30)
The Local said:
Swedish liquor stores shuttered by PC update

Published: 22 Apr 10 15:22 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/26232/20100422/

A large number of Sweden's alcohol retail monopoly Systembolaget stores have been kept closed on Thursday as a result of problems with an anti-virus update that is causing mayhem worldwide.

"We currently have 25 stores closed and 100 more with problems," said Lennart Ag?n, a Systembolaget spokesperson, to news agency TT.

"We have been working with this all night and hope to be able to solve it within a couple of hours and be back at full speed tomorrow," he continued. Ag?n was unwilling to give any indication as to the problems suffered by the monopoly retailer.

"We don't look at it like that, the most important thing is to able to provide service to our customers," he said.

The problem has been caused by a fault in an anti-virus system made by US software firm McAfee. "The antivirus programme was sent to our stores overnight. The fault has affected a great number of firms worldwide and Systembolaget is one of these," the firm writes on its homepage.

As long as the problems persist Systembolaget will not be allowed to open its stores. The problems reportedly stem from a faulty update which has reacted against an important systems file in the Windows XP operating system.

Daily Mail said:
Millions of computers shut down as faulty anti-virus program causes havoc around the globe
Last updated at 12:33 PM on 22nd April 2010

Computers in companies, hospitals and schools around the world slowed down or froze after an antivirus program identified a normal Windows file as a threat.

While the problem has now been identified, IT technicians are today having to deal with extra workloads to ensure their systems are protected.

Antivirus vendor McAfee Inc confirmed that yesterday a software update had caused its antivirus program for corporate customers to target a harmless file, leading PCs to repeadedly reboot themselves.

McAfee posted a replacement update and said in a statement: 'We are not aware of significant impact on consumers.' But, judging by online postings, the number of computers affected was at least in the ten of thousands and possibly in the millions.

The technology news website CNET said that frustrated users vented their anger on Twitter and on IT related mailing lists. Sonny Hashmi, the deputy chief information officer of the District of Columbia, called it a 'huge disruption', adding that McAfee is now on his 'blacklist', the site reported.

Further employee posts on Twitter showed that one victim of the big freeze was Intel Corp, although the firm did not make an official statement. The computer problem forced about a third of the hospitals in Rhode Island to postpone elective surgeries and to stop treating patients without traumas in A&E.

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 Virginia also lost computer access. 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 Mike Rothman, president of computer security firm Securosis, said the scale of this outage was unusual, adding: 'It looks to be a train wreck.'

McAfee said the problem was confined to corporate customers, as consumer versions of its software seemed to be unaffected.

Peter Juvinall, systems administrator at Illinois State University, 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 around the world, personal attention to each PC from a technician appeared to be the only way to fix the problem. The recovery was slowed by the fact that PCs caught in a reboot cycle are not receptive to remote software updates.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...ses-millions-PCs-shut-down.html#ixzz0lrkQRqZQ

Most (except for corporate customers it seems) already knew McAfee sucking power exceed that of a black hole, but this time they really outdid themselves! :lol:

Why are they still in the business anyway? They havent been competitive since 1997!
 
Last edited:
You would think that testing to make sure your program didn't destroy the most common OS around would be a priority.
 
Shut down the college my girlfriend works at for almost half the day.
 
Why are they still in the business anyway? They havent been competitive since 1997!

Well, this might well do it; and good riddance! McAfee is utter shit in every way. MSE FTW! :D
 
JUst as I was reading this, my McAfee (yes, I know, but I can't find anything better for my personal PC situation) popped up a big "important update required" thingy about something even though it finished updating 2 minutes before that. Just found that amusing.

If anybody on here has been affected by this, Bleeping Computer has a tutorial online on how to restore the file so your computer will work again (from memory, it's the svchost.exe file being deleted)

Thing is though, whilst McAfee has a lot of false positives (which I have experienced and freaked out about many times before), I think it is a hell of a lot better than Symantec/Norton. That thing doesn't pick up genuine infections that McAfee does and it fubared my old computer when i unistalled it. Yet my dad and his parents still persist with it and expect me to clean up the mess when it fails. I've oly had the false positives issue with McAfee and trouble instaling it on my netbook (although that was more my horrendously crap internet connection)

EDIT: I'm going to be murdered for admitting I run McAfee aren't I? Oh well, may look for alternatives once my subscription is up.
 
Last edited:
brydiem:
Microsoft Security Essentials
 
brydiem:
Microsoft Security Essentials

That, or Norton if you really have to pay for AV, it's great now but I can't justify the cost.
 
LOL! All the computers in my university use McAfee
:lol:
 
AVG for me, had it for 2 years, use internet every day, finds the odd trojan now and then, quite happy with it. I used to use an "acquired" version of kaspersky which was alot better.
 
AVG rocks. Just download the demo and let it run out. During the unistall process it will give you the option to use a stripped down version for free. for
 
Last edited:
While i am forced by corporate policy to deploy McAfee to every computer at work, our IT department at least has the version they deploy use a local repository - and they test every update before installing it. Judging from the fact that my phone is not ringing right now, they found the faulty update and never deployed it locally.
 
I know, free AV from Microsoft being the best? WTF? But it's true!

Only time i've experience it was on a laptop, it was gunning the CPU at 100% and even if you killed the process it would just respawn and zombie again. Decided not to use it.
 
Only time i've experience it was on a laptop, it was gunning the CPU at 100% and even if you killed the process it would just respawn and zombie again. Decided not to use it.

Are you sure it wasn't doing an initial scan or something?
 
More to the point, why do Swedish liquor store computers that do such un-complex operations as bookkeeping and point-of-sale need anti-virus software? Are they even connected to the internet, much less downloading any potentially harmful files from it?
 
<insertobligatoryLinuxsuperioritycommenthere> ;)

Actually, backups are very nice to have.
 
More to the point, why do Swedish liquor store computers that do such un-complex operations as bookkeeping and point-of-sale need anti-virus software? Are they even connected to the internet, much less downloading any potentially harmful files from it?

Our company supports a liquor store POS software, and the answer is very yes (though I can't speak for Sweden).

Best AV I've found so far is Avira Antivir, less intrusive and resource-intensive than AVG, and equally free. It's saved multiple computers for my immediate family (somehow I have never run into any issues personally).

It does false positive sometimes, but it's quite easy to turn off active guard temporarily. This was not the case last time I used AVG or McAffee.
 
Top