By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
(04-21) 14:45 PDT 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.
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.
___
AP Business Writer Daniel Wagner in Washington contributed to this report.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/04/21/financial/f111720D30.DTL
No comments:
Post a Comment