Chris Posted May 21, 2007 Report Share Posted May 21, 2007 Millions of Chinese PCs running Symantec antivirus software have been incapacitated by a faulty virus signature distributed last week, government media reported Sunday.A virus-signature update delivered automatically to users on Friday about 1:00 a.m. Beijing time to Symantec's antivirus scanning engine mistook two critical system files of the Simplified Chinese edition of Windows XP Service Pack 2 for a Trojan horse. The two files -- netapi32.dll and lsasrv.dll -- were falsely quarantined, which in turn crippled Windows. If an affected PC was rebooted, Windows failed on start-up and showed only a blue screen. "The update of Norton's virus database on Friday has caused millions of PCs and computers to crash, a heavy blow to people's daily work and ongoing business," China's state-sponsored Xinhau News Agency said Sunday. Other reports, which cited numbers as low as 7,000 affected PCs, also circulated in Chinese technology and mainstream media reports over the weekend, with crippled systems said to be concentrated in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou province. Symantec re-released a revised signature update around 2:30 p.m. Friday, Beijing time, but the fix was too late for any PC that had been rebooted in the intervening 13 and a half hours. Those now-worthless systems needed new copies of the two .dll files restored to the hard drive's "windows\system32" directory. China-based bloggers and pundits criticized the U.S. company for not clearly posting information about the problem, and worse, not linking to a solution for restoring computers from its support site. "You'd think if you accidentally killed a few hundred thousand PCs in China, you'd mention it on your website, hmm?, and put some links on how to recover from it," wrote a a South African expatriate living in Shanghai.More | HereWhoops Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb Posted May 23, 2007 Report Share Posted May 23, 2007 That's what you should expect if you install Symantec software! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Posted June 26, 2007 Author Report Share Posted June 26, 2007 Symantec offers compensation for bad update Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-pops- Posted June 27, 2007 Report Share Posted June 27, 2007 How to kill off the world's largest potential market for your product.As Pat says, what do you expect from such a company? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andsome Posted June 27, 2007 Report Share Posted June 27, 2007 I was always quite happy with Norton System Works until I had a real problem. The solution according to the website was to uninstall it and start afresh. The problem persisted as so much junk remains after an uninstall. It proved nigh on impossible to find where on the website that I could send them an e mail. Eventually someone provided a link. They recommended a series of so called removal tools, none of which completely cleared out all the junk, and I still could not achieve a clean re installation. Eventually a so called technical expert was put onto the case, and after a series of e mails between us, and editing the registry under his instructions, I got things up and running again. Soon afterwards, I was told how to reinstall XP, and happily did so, and got rid of Norton once and for all. NEVER EVER again thanks. A friend also recently had similar problems, but in her case my past experience enabled me to eliminate it on her computer, and she now uses Zone Alarm security suite.The whole problem with Symantec is that they have done a first class selling job. All the big stores stock and recommend the programs, and the P C magazines usually give a good write up. For me, it is significant that on forums such as this, (and others), people with experience DO NOT use this over invasive, bloated load of rubbish. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andsome Posted June 27, 2007 Report Share Posted June 27, 2007 Just had time for a good read of the follow up link. Some compensation offer that is isn't it? More of the same rubbish. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seshomaru Samma Posted June 27, 2007 Report Share Posted June 27, 2007 I live in China and I suspect that the large majority of Norton users are running a pirated version.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andsome Posted June 27, 2007 Report Share Posted June 27, 2007 I live in China and I suspect that the large majority of Norton users are running a pirated version....Norton probably deserve no more. :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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