Friday, April 23, 2010

McAfee Virus Protection Attacks svchost.exe on Windows XP

Luckilly, we only use McAfee on a few machines and they happen to not be the OS affected by the latest problem with virus definition 5958.

When I heard about this, it reminded me when we use to have McAfee Virus Protection across all of our computers on our network (back in 2000 in the Windows 95-98 days.)  We had a very similar problem with machines at 100% CPU usage.  I did some hunting and found a news post back from when we had that problem.

New McAfee virus update can freeze some computers - [http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/11/07/mcafee.windows.freeze.idg/index.html]
"...
November 7, 2000
Web posted at: 9:23 a.m. EST (1423 GMT)
...
(IDG) -- The latest virus definition update for Network Associates' McAfee VirusScan can freeze computer systems, Network Associates has confirmed.

"It can cause the CPU utilization of the machine to go to 100%, effectively freezing the system for an extended period of time," said Simon Leech, an Amsterdam security engineer for Network Associates.
..."

I feel for all the customers struggling with fixing their machines from this mishap.  One thing positive, at least it wasn't malicious and/or a data breach to add further insult to injury.

McAfee should have learned something from The Website is Down, episode #4, "Sales Demolination".  "... Fake a virus attack. ... How do you think I made it 20 years in I.T. ..."  [http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/]

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Microsoft's Cloud Computing

I went to the Microsoft Virtualization Summit today in Irvine, CA.  It ended up being about how all the components of virtualization aggregate into cloud computing, how to use cloud computing to be greener, and how cloud computing will be more transparent to applications and design in the future.

What I took away from today:
Here's the obligatory pun, "I had my head in the Clouds at Microsoft's conference today".