[CaseyFan]

McAfee's popular antivirus software failed spectacularly on Wednesday, causing tens of thousands of Windows XP computers to crash or repeatedly reboot.

A buggy update that the company released early in the day turned the software's formidable defenses against malicious software inward, prompting it to attack a vital component of Microsoft Windows. The update was available for business customers for about four hours before distribution was halted, McAfee said.

The damage was widespread: The University of Michigan's medical school reported that 8,000 of its 25,000 computers crashed. Police in Lexington, Ky., resorted to hand-writing reports and turned off their patrol car terminals as a precaution. Some jails cancelled visitation, and Rhode Island hospitals turned away non-trauma patients at emergency rooms and postponed some elective surgeries.

Intel was also hit by McAfee's bungled update, a source inside the company confirmed to CNET. The source said that all Intel's computers inside the United States ran McAfee and many were affected, but didn't know how many or whether it impacted the company's factories.

The update releasted at 6 a.m. PT effectively redirected the PC's immune system, causing it to attack a legitimate operating system component known as SVCHOST.EXE in the same way that some diseases can cause the human immune system to turn inward. In this case, McAfee's application incorrectly confused it with malware known as the W32/Wecorl.a virus.

McAfee apologized to customers for the problem, which seemed to affect primarily Windows XP computers running Microsoft's Service Pack 3, but downplayed its impact. "We are not aware of significant impact on consumers," the company said in a statement sent to CNET at 2 p.m. PT.

Screen snapshot of CNET News editor's computer in Portland after McAfee was causing her computer to reboot.
(Credit: CNET)

That didn't endear the company to the enterprise users who were the most affected by the update, especially system administrators who were forced to trek from computer to computer and manually install the repair that McAfee had made available by midday. It's not clear how many customers were affected, and a McAfee representative said she did not have an update. (Here's a related CNET article on how to fix your McAfee-crippled PC.)

Tech-related mailing lists soon began buzzing with complaints. And the condemnation on Twitter was unrelenting, with Sonny Hashmi, the deputy chief information officer of the District of Columbia calling it a "huge disruption," adding that McAfee is now on his "blacklist." An engineer in San Francisco said that, thanks to McAfee, "the wait at my work is two days and growing to get your laptop back." Others complained that, approximately six hours after the problem was known, McAfee has yet to post a note on the home page -- which currently boasts of "technology to supercharge your network security."

A CNET News editor in Portland was affected Wednesday morning when her computer lost network and Internet connections, and McAfee prevented her from launching programs or uninstalling it.

A report at the Internet Storm Center said the errant McAfee update registered a false positive that flagged the Windows file svchost.exe as a virus.

Compounding what seems to be a day of snafus for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company was it's initial recommendation that affected users download a file from its support site. But after tens of thousands of irate users flooded into the forums, the site abruptly went offline, and began to return an error message.

McAfee has posted a Web page on a separate site with detailed instructions on how to fix XP computers that have been crashing because of Wednesday's update. It recommends manually downloading and installing an "EXTRA.DAT" file, and then restore files that have been incorrectly quarantined.

But that option requires a least a modest amount of technical ability, and as of 4 p.m. PDT, the company had not offered a better way. "McAfee is continuing to work on an automated solution," the page said.

Last updated at 4:45 p.m. and rewritten to include more details, background

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-20003074-83.html
=================================
Midland College was hit hard by this. To prevent updates the IT department pulled the plug on the internet connection for the whole college. If so at least 1/3 of the computers got the bad update and are will have to manually patched.

I don't recommend McAfee or Norton. I use AVG. Didn't get a single call from my regular clients about this.

[syptopsygieds]

How to fix your McAfee-crippled computer

http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4...?tag=mncol;txt

[sirmzereigMix]

How to fix your McAfee-crippled computer

http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4...?tag=mncol;txt

I use kaspersky on my windows computer.

do i need a virus scanner for Ubuntu, or is it built into the system?

[tramdoctorsss]

No Ubuntu has no built in AV program. There are some in the respositories and some third party that you can install but frankly there isn't any need. There virtually aren't any Linux viruses. Most of the AV products out there for Linux scan for any known virus regardless of OS. You can't be infected by a Windows virus but a linux based one will flag it if found.

http://www.linux.com/news/software/a...tivirus-needed

[zlopikanikanza]

I heard one of the Odessa Hospitals got hit with this today.

[Gymnarnemia]

No Ubuntu has no built in AV program. There are some in the respositories and some third party that you can install but frankly there isn't any need. There virtually aren't any Linux viruses. Most of the AV products out there for Linux scan for any known virus regardless of OS. You can't be infected by a Windows virus but a linux based one will flag it if found.

http://www.linux.com/news/software/a...tivirus-needed

so would No script be more of a nuisance than a help?

[Wheldcobchoto]

One reason I don't do auto update on ANYTHING...........wait and let someone else find the bugs!!!

In the Unix/Linux environment there just are no "viruses", I have never in over 20 years seen one. Now I have crashed my share of them myself, but that is what mirrored drives are for. I love hot swap!!!

[Paybeskf]

One reason I don't do auto update on ANYTHING...........wait and let someone else find the bugs!!!

In the Unix/Linux environment there just are no "viruses", I have never in over 20 years seen one. Now I have crashed my share of them myself, but that is what mirrored drives are for. I love hot swap!!!

That is what i need to do. I love my new Ubuntu system, but would hate to have to navigate through the configuration again. Creating a backup swap drive is something i may do.

Would it just be a USB external HD? Or would i need to pull apart the case and do it that way?

I know nothing about some of this stuff.

[Figelac]

That is what i need to do. I love my new Ubuntu system, but would hate to have to navigate through the configuration again. Creating a backup swap drive is something i may do.

Would it just be a USB external HD? Or would i need to pull apart the case and do it that way?

I know nothing about some of this stuff.

Yes I think you can do an external HD...........however I usually put in a second internal drive and do it that way. But I don't see why an external would not work. Nline might know more.............

Edit: I googled it........
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/ubu...plication.html

[d1Bc25UP]

She is talking about a RAID setup. You'd have to reinstall Ubuntu to get that going. But you can copy your /home directory over and have the same setup as now. Many linux users put there /home directory on a separate partition just for that purpose. You can upgrade and keep your current settings.

[HsSp82U8]

Clonezilla is what I use to perform a image copy of a HDD. That isn't dynamic live copy but a static copy. It's like Ghost or Acronis in the winblows world.

http://clonezilla.org/

[LottiFurmann]

She is talking about a RAID setup. You'd have to reinstall Ubuntu to get that going. But you can copy your /home directory over and have the same setup as now. Many linux users put there /home directory on a separate partition just for that purpose. You can upgrade and keep your current settings.

Can it be backed up to flash?

To partition....i have only messed with that once back in the Win98 days (PartitionMagic, i think).

Is there a simple tool in the repository?

[affozyBoomi]

You partition the drive when you install it. During the install you could have selected to do that.

fdisk is already there for the command line. And I think you should already have gparted on the system for a gnome based GUI. If not then you can install it via any of the install methods on the system.

sudo apt-get install gparted

[economex]

Can it be backed up to flash? Can what be backed up to flash?

[betraaaus]

Can what be backed up to flash?

My home folder.

Am i wrong for thinking about it in a Windows mentality?

[ToifvT5S]

My home folder.

If the flash drive is big enough you can backup to it. You can either drag and drop the files or you can use a backup program to do it. You can even learn how to make a tarball (a tar file, like a zip file) from the command line. The back up program will use a GUI to do that. The output is a single compressed file.

Am i wrong for thinking about it in a Windows mentality? Yes. This is Linux. It's better.

For example the file system in Linux is better. You have none of this Drive C:, D: crap that Windows has.

Everything is off of root "/"

Drives in linux are mounted. And they can be mounted anywhere you want them to be.

Your flash drive for example. ubuntu has a program already running called automount that will place the drive at /media/usb or /media/usb0. You can disable that program and manually mount the drive in your home directory.

You could place it at /home/bfft/usb
or you could put it /usbdrive.

You simply have to create the directory and then mount the drive at that point.

In Windows if you add a second hard drive to an already existing system the drive becomes D: and pushes your cdrom to E: That can mess up some programs that access the drive by drive letter. Forcing you to reconfigure or reinstall. Not the case in Linux. Unless you unmount a drive it's location isn't changed by adding new hardware.

[pBiRXp8u]

I was using AVG but I decided to try Avast with my latest windows install.

It seems to use less resources.

[ringsarcle]

Been busy here, had to break out the rarely used "IT Outage - Triage" manual last week. Still working on repairing computers.

If you see anyone wearing McAfee branded clothing, punch them in the nose for me.

[TudareWQT]

Yeah I saw your tweet on that. How many PCs do you guys have to manage?

[TamreuddyRada]

Pushing 4 figures globally on the corporate network. I got lucky, just 33 in my scope of responsibility (WT/SENM).