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Symantec Crashes Chinese Computers
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-05-21
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
The company's Norton antivirus product declared a couple of important Windows components to be malware after a flawed signature update.
 | | Symantec Crashes Chinese Computers |  |
Although many people have joked about Windows being a computer virus, it took a bad signature file for a security product to take the joke seriously.
The Norton AntiVirus product from Symantec picked up a bad update file on May 17. Chinese publication Xinhua said over a thousand Windows users subsequently found their machines crippled by the new signatures.
That update file pegged a couple of vital components, netapi32.dll and lsasrv.dll, as being malicious content. Norton diligently wiped the files from those updated computers, resulting in system crashes and recurring problems after reboot.
Red-faced Symantec personnel were left scrambling for a fix. A company spokesman cited in the report said Symantec was working on a solution to the issue.
Windows XP machines with Norton AntiVirus, running Microsoft's simplified Chinese version of that operating system, have been the ones falling victim to last week's update. There could be several million installations of that combination in China, with each system falling victim if it grabs the bad update file.
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Tags: China, Norton, Windows XP, Symantec
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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