BOSTON (Reuters) - A bug in an update of Symantec Corp's anti-virus software caused some Windows PCs to crash late this week, making machines inoperable until they were serviced in an embarrassing episode that angered some customers.
Read the full story here.
It appears the workaround was a manual removal of each installation of the endpoint security from every individual workstation that was affected. What a pain!
Symantec's explanation from their website is as follows:
"The root cause of the issue was an incompatibility due to a three-way interaction between software that implements a file system driver using kernel stack-based file objects. The three-way interaction is between the software that implements a file system driver (using kernel stack-based file objects), the SONAR signature and the Windows XP Cache manager. The SONAR signature update caused new file operations that create the conflict and led to the system crash."
In layman's terms, they had a false positive on some encryption software. Unfortunately, that meant a whole lot of computers went down, requiring a tremendous amount of effort by affected customers to remediate the damage.
Yikes. Maybe it's time for enterprise anti-virus subscribers to try a different enterprise solution, like Webroot.
At Webroot, you get free, U.S-based support. Plus we're not randomly crashing your computers either! 😉
Symantec Enterprise Update Caused BSODs
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Userlevel 7
It looks as if Symantec users are out of luck if they're looking to get compensated for the time lost while their endpoints were unusable:
Here's the updated story from a couple of days ago.
Here's the updated story from a couple of days ago.
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