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 A glitch in McAfee’s Antivirus system knocked out computers around the world last week, including computers at MSU.
The McAfee update was designed and released specifically to address a new virus threat affecting Windows XP service pack 3. The file caused problems by incorrectly identifying a critical Windows system file as a virus threat and quarantined it.
Gary Holeman, MSU assistant vice president for technology, said, “The computers need that file to function. Computers infected with the update went to a blue screen and crashed. Then to top it off, the system couldn’t restart without the file, so users were stuck in a continuous reboot cycle.”
McAfee released the update at 6 a.m. April 21, but they did not recognize the seriousness of the issue until the afternoon of that day. MSU was able to avert major problems because the university’s computer system upgrades at 1 a.m. by default. However computers that require manually changed default settings for updates, or computers that had the update manually downloaded, were affected by the glitch, Holeman said.
“There were 50 computers, that we know of, that were affected out of the more than 2,500 computers the university controls,” Holeman said. “The main difficulty was identifying the problem. We, like many people, thought we were dealing with a virus, we didn’t suspect that it was a lost file, which was misplaced by the antivirus.”
McAfee released a file to stop their update the same day the glitch occurred, and released another file the next day, called a superDAT, that fixed the problem caused by the update and put the quarantined system file back in its proper place. MSU had all infected computers fixed and operational by 11 a.m. on the day that the superDAT was released, Holeman said.
Many customers, however, were upset with the way that McAfee handled the situation. By the time McAfee posted on its website that the glitch came from its software the information was already on dozens of blogs and hundreds of thousands of computers had been affected, Holeman said.
McAfee is, however, is offering a free two-year subscription extension to home computers affected by the glitch, and is in the process of developing an offer for a “customer commitment package” for affected businesses and corporations, according McAfee’s website.
“We will discuss changing our antivirus service,” Holeman said. “But I do not think we have a very valid reason to do that. By reacting to this glitch McAfee may well have the best quality assurance in the industry for a while.
Though police departments and school systems in Fayette and other counties reported entire systems down for a few hours, most computer users in the Morehead community seem not to have been affected by the problem.
The Morehead City Police Department, the Morehead State University Police Department, and St. Claire Regional Medical Center all reported using other antivirus programs and did not experience any symptoms connected to the glitch.
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