One of the world’s largest anti-virus software companies, McAfee, released a patch today that falsely identified a critical piece of Windows as a virus. Carleton uses the McAfee software, and a number of computers on campus were hit with this problem. Around the world, thousands or millions of computers were also impacted. You can read more about this problem here.
ITS staff were alerted to the situation soon after it was noticed this morning. They diagnosed the problem and crafted a fix. By noon, teams of ITS staff and student workers were fanning out across the campus armed with repair disks and procedures for restoring the damage caused by the corrupt file.
To the best of our knowledge, all your personal files on your computer are fine. This problem only affected a Windows system file, which is restored during our repair process.
We are attempting to visit all the Windows machines used by faculty and staff, to assess whether the computer was impacted by this problem and, if so, fix it. We are doing the same for all classroom and public lab computers as well.
Affected machines show the following symptoms:
– Cannot log in (this applies to campus machines only)
– Unable to connect to the network or internet (IP address reads 0.0.0.0)
– Windows forces itself to shut down, displaying a dialog box with a countdown
– The Windows task bar appears gray (instead of blue) and does not show the programs which are running
If we accidentally miss your machine, and it is exhibiting any of the symptoms above, please call Rapid Response at x5999 and we’ll help get your computer up and running again as quickly as we can.
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If you have a Windows machine at home that was affected by this problem:
There is an excellent chance that, even though this event was very disruptive to the Carleton community at work, this will not be a problem for you at home, even if you are using McAfee VirusScan. They have already taken the corrupted file from their site and replaced it with a newer, updated version that does not have the problem.
McAfee is currently working on an automated solution to fully resolve the issue for affected customers. While we could not wait for that solution on campus, we are currently thinking that might be the best solution for home machines affected by this problem.
If your home computer has the symptoms mentioned above, we recommend waiting a day before repairing it, in hopes that McAfee will release a fully tested, easy-to-implement repair for the problem they created. We will post information about this on Thursday, April 22nd, on the front page of the ITS site: https://apps.carleton.edu/campus/its/
If your home computer is working just fine, with none of the symptoms mentioned above, you need not be concerned for your home computer, in regards to the problem described in this note.
If you have any questions or concerns about any of this, please call Rapid Response at x5999.