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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!
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