“About a third of the hospitals in Rhode Island were forced to stop treating patients without traumas in emergency rooms,” Svensson reports.
MacDailyNews Take: If vehicle-makers sold products as unreliable as Microsoft’s, they’d be sued into oblivion. Yet, with Microsoft products, total failure in critical situations is not only immediately absolved, it’s expected.
Svensson continues, “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 Twitte,” Svensson reports. “Intel did not immediately return calls for comment.”
Full article here.
Declan McCullagh reports for CNET, “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.”
“Early reports attributed the widespread problems to a routine McAfee update that caused computers with Microsoft’s Service Pack 3 installed to incorrectly identify a legitimate operating system component as containing a virus,” McCullagh reports. “A report at the Internet Storm Center said the McAfee update registered a false positive and flagged the Windows file svchost.exe as a virus.”
“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,” McCullagh reports. “But that option requires a least a modest amount of technical ability, and as of 1 p.m. PDT, the company had not offered a better way.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Life’s too short for such bullshit (especially if you were in a Rhode Island hospital today). If you make it out alive, Get a Mac.
After all, if Microsoft weren’t so inept, people wouldn’t still be using a nine year old operating system.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Bill” and “Wil” for the heads up.]
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No easy fix! Manually have to fix each and every Microsoft TAX Generating computer? Ahahahaha.. Yet we get news about how unsecure Mac/iPod/iPhone/iPad….. just nonsense talk.
While Microsoft provides the real TAX. What a big FAIL by your IT/CIO Windows only mindset leaders.
Intel Worldwide computers were down all day and are still down as of 4:30pm Pacific time. At the huge fab I work at, their toxic chemical supervisory computers were all down. Email down.
Should have bought a Mac!
McAffee has shown how unorganized it is not to have a validated testing routine that cycles through all the Windoze OS varients on various hardware before releasing a patch.
It also shows they are NOT using a list of known files from the basic Win OS’s to check against if their detection program does detect a virus to see if it is detecting something it should not detect (which is exactly what it did).
McAfee simply has no proper code validation procedure that is followed to a Tee.
Heads must roll on this one.
I’m a Mac user by choice, but I work in the IT field.
My whole day today and all of tomorrow will be spent fixing this.
UGH!!!
I read palaver’s comment from above in a robot voice–HILARIOUS! try it…
cool down. It’s mcafee issue not xp. Affected machines w. 5958.dat have checkpoint restore dissabled even in safe mode and connection to Internet dissabled. So how to restore the deleted files is not clear. Good that pc have USB
good job mcafee: your dat update is a perfect virus!
see!? told you!
Is a Freudian slip a sign of sentience?
MDN Magic Word: coming, as in Skynet is coming.
The slogan on MDN’s faux Microsoft ad should read:
Your frustration, Our profit.
The jokes write themselves at this point.
@whatdidyouexpect
yes, hospitals, docs, nurses have contingency plans. medicine can be practiced and people can be cared if necessary without computers.
while computers help in the practice of medicine to a certain extent just like computers help in airports and in the banking industry, the primary role currently is….. documentation to satisfy bureaucratic committees, medicolegal documentation, and to satisfy insurance and medicare bureaucrats that care was provided and should be paid for.
doesnt matter how many people you save, you dont get a dime if it isnt documented by those standards. things are now so rifdiculous that primary care physicians spend 60-70% time on documentation, not actually seeing patients and taking care of them.
just my 2 cents as a medical resident.
without those stringent documentation requirements set purely by bureaucrats, a lot more time can be spent by doctors and health professionals in actually treating patients. and computers wont be that essential.
that is not to say that IT never helps organise information…obviously it does and makes care more effcient, helps quickly lookup patients charts, labs and other medical info, look up latest recommendations, etc, but the current focus of IT imlementation is more geared towards satisfying documentation requirements purely for reimbursement. thats why all those barcodes and scanning, took place, not because “docs and nurses didnt know what to do or were lost without computers”. They were probably lost wondering about the consequences when the bureaucrats would come after them for nondocumentation.
docs and nurses would be happy to be rid of much of the tedium and focus on treating patients. if only they will get paid for it.
“In all fairness, it was McAfee that caused this meltdown…”
No- If Windows was written more securely- there would be no need for McAffee. Windows was NOT built for the internet- all the security is “bolted on”- much like a car without factory air conditioning. It kind of works but it’s not as good. Do you really think WindowsNT was a re-write? No- it has pieces of Windows 3.x, Windows 2000 has NT in it. Windows 2K3 and XP have common components. This was all done for backwards compatibility. “Backwards” being the keyword here. Do you think the registry was new when Windows95 came out- no- there was a registry in Windows 3x too.
Unix from it’s very inception- was built with security at its core. It was part of the original architecture. Why do you think it’s easier to add security updates to a Unix centric OS- the updates are just tweaks, not complete makeovers like what the Windows engineers have to do. Microsoft’s approach to security has always been to engage the user to make decisions… hence “cancel or allow”.
In all fairness- Windows sucks.
Critical applications such as emergency rooms should stick to Unix.
I am no Windows user — but it’s patently unfair to characterize a huge blunder in Macafee’s part — as evidence of Window’s failings.
Well, I say it’s about time people realized that Windows IS malware.
I emailed MDN a link to a similar article appearing on Electronista: McAfee update wreaks havoc on enterprise XP systems
Reminded me of an earlier post I put up regarding the German government plans to fund Microsoft malware bailout back in December.
So, please, someone tell me: Just why are the consumer groups (and governments too) the World over silent on the matter of permitting the likes of M$ to ship shoddy product, which is so easily hacked, that it has sprouted a cottage-industry of anti-virus manufacturers?
Why are they allowing the average consumer to be ripped off three times over: by the maker of the OS, the inflicter of the virus, and the maker of the anti-virus utility which in this case has gone rogue?
Why the triple shakedown?
@Brian
Brian- in most cases, I’d agree with you… not here. svchost.exe is a core operating system file. It should have NEVER been allowed to be tampered with- the OS, regardless, should protect itself. Windows XP allowed this to happen. The fault lies within Microsoft.
There is no McAfee A-V software on my Mac. I didn’t have a problem. Mac OS X doesn’t need A-V software. The Mac saved me from the Windows problems.
Windows is the problem.
Ha! I go with the comment up there.
They get what they deserve.
My classroom at a Canada university was down today. I teach graphic design on XP machines. Bleech! 1200 compters were down.
I’d have to ask why the various IT departments didn’t do exhaustive testing of the patch on multiple test systems before deploying the update?
What did these geeks do, say: “Cool! An update!! Let her rip (a hole in our network)!”
Sad to that 80% of worlds population are complete idiots.
I have a friend who works in a health center lab, and this center was similarly severely impacted by this episode. Consider the situation where every doctor, nurse, and health care provider goes to the hospital computer network to obtain the lab results on their patients for that period, but they cannot obtain those results, because the lab personnel cannot upload the data to the hospital IT system, because the computers have all crashed. Care would have to be postponed, medication regimens might have to be adjusted or delayed absent that data, surgeries would be postponed, etc.
I have a friend that works for Semens. All the MRI and CAT scan machines he repairs used to run on Unix, but some genius decided to move all this to Windows.
We run an HP Indigo press, it has been down a couple of times, because Windows decided to corrupt some part of the system. By far, it is the weakest link of the whole press.
This is not a problem for us serious minded windows users. I have McAfee installed… and then Norton to watch it and then FSecure to watch that.
I am now looking for good software to monitor FSecure, but I am sure I´ll find what I need pretty soon.
Sure it takes 35 min to boot up, but you don´t need to do that more than 2-3 times a day. Reading mail or surfing the web is a bit more painful… and I´m sure you guys have the same problems with your MACs.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d say Microsoft actually payed McAfee to brick all these XP machines in order to force Windows 7 “upgrades”.
Sadly, that scenario isn’t as far-fetched as it should be.