Breaking news: TrendMicro Officescan + Windows domains is killing XP machines

[Justin]

Starting about 1.5 hours ago, around 4pm pacific time, an update for OfficeScan, I believe virus patterns, was released.

For those who don't know, OfficeScan is a very popular windows networking virus protection software that is used often on Windows domains. It is developed by Trend Micro (who make PC-Cillin)

This latest update, when it is pushed to the client (which happens when you login to the machine via domain), will make any Windows XP machine freeze, unable to get to the desktop.

This does not affect windows 2000 machines.

In a few hours, the same update for ServerProtect is being pushed to Windows 2003 servers. I wonder if it will take those servers down as well. I'll post more when I find out more information. I thought this was interesting because this easily is affecting companies all over the country at this very moment.

I bet TrendMicro's call center is lit up like a christmas tree.

 

[Goalie]

You woulda thought they'd test such an update against a domain.

The last time I saw something like this was from McAffee. Only affected win2k domain machines with roaming profiles. McAffee was really quick on the response, however, had emailed us about the problem before we even had started to see it. Had a patch like an hour later, I think, and all was well.

Also once saw one that was caused my MS's most recent update being installed.. an unpatched machine was fine, but the patched machine that recieved a pushed update (I think this was for an AFS client) broke. IIRC in the end it was determined that MS's patch was at fault and broke other things, and MS like usual patched the patch.

This is also a good reason to not have machines pull patches directly from a vendor when you can.. a decent corporate environment will test the patches.

Thanks for the heads up Soul..

 

[Justin]

Here's the wrap up for the story:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/25/pc-cillin_duff_update/


It was fixed on saturday. Hooray! But that doesn't alleviate the cries of hundreds of customers who are angry at *my* work.