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McAfee antivirus program goes berserk, freezes PCs

2010-04-22 06:07:14

By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer Peter Svensson, Ap Technology Writer

Wed Apr 21, 5:45 pm ET

NEW YORK 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.