Outbreak of Symantec Auto-Immune Disorder reported in China
Chinese news agencies are reporting that “millions” of Windows PCs in the country (or at least 7,000) were turned into boat anchors over the weekend by a flawed antivirus update from Symantec. The faulty virus signature, acknowledged by Symantec, mistakenly identified two critical system files — netapi32.dll and lsasrv.dll — in the Simplified Chinese edition of Windows XP Service Pack 2 as malware. The files were dutifully quarantined, rendering Windows inoperable. Symantec fixed the file a half day after it was released, but any affected machine that was rebooted in the interim is now capable of showing the Blue Screen of Death and that’s all.
Symantec says the owners of crippled machines will need to restore the two files from their recovery disk, which is fine as long as the seller was kind enough to include one. And of course anyone running a pirated copy of Windows is out of luck. Hmm, wait a second … no, must not give in to conspiracy thinking.
MS & Symantec working together, why that would be like MS & Apple working together!
Oh, wait!
MS still owns a chunk of Apple stock & makes a lot of money from Office for the Mac.
Our buddies in PRC might want to get a trustworthy AV system from other than ST. A good place to start is in/near Russia…
Good job microsoft. That is something to be proud of. I can’t help but clap my hands.
If anyone care’s to think this sort of thing could not have happened with any other software, is sadly mistaken. I doubt it matters what brand software one were to use, if not this, other bad things have/can happen with them as well. This simply points out the necessity for a good back up plan, and save often!
Though I am sure every mac Idiot out there will start clammering “Ooo this would never have happend on a Mac! you should switch”…. Yea, untill another Operating system released, and you need a new Mac to run it… Oh, I love how they ALWAYS forget to mention that almost always, the Mac OS’s are not backward compatable… but I guess that just conviently slipps by the mac fans…Hell, I guess you you prefer a manufactorer who only allows one source for its hardware, like the iron fist of Hitler himself, I suppose you deserve to pay more for it. Ah, but hell, I am sure the mac people also think that if more people owned mac’s, there would not be more people making viri for them… Nope, its nice to live in their own little world…… Oh, and by the way, Mac’s never Lock up either!.