April 26, 2005

Trend Micro, a Japanese antivirus company, on Friday afternoon released a computer freezing update (!) for users of Windows XP Service Pack 2. The corrupted virus pattern file was released at approximately 3:30 PDT, and was available for about 90 minutes.

It is unclear how many customers downloaded the update, but one IT worker said in an angry email, "this...update took down virtually all 1,500 of our Windows XP SP2 PCs and required many hours of work to resolve.

"The machines were rendered inoperable once this signature hit and required many of us to work through Friday night. Our entire IT staff had to come in on Saturday to attempt to fix this disaster."

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Once the problem was realized, Trend took down the update and fixed the problem. Apologies were made as well a promise to compensate customers for their losses.

Michael Sweeney, a spokesman for Trend Micro said, "We apologize for the impact we may have caused, and we've certainly begun making investments and improvements to ensure such a problem doesn't happen in the future."

This isn't the first of embarrassing mistakes for Trend. In February of this year, Internet Security Systems found a flaw in Trend Micro's virus-scanning software that allowed hackers to create a hole in an antivirus product.

The hole, if left unmended, could cause the antivirus program to run a virus instead of blocking the malicious program.

Source: SPN

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