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Trend Micro Bug Hits Several Important Computers
dmarx writes "The Japan Times reports that a bug in Trend Micro's antivirus software has caused the CPUs of several important computers, including those at East Japan Railway, to grind to a halt. A bug free version was released on noon Saturday." From the article: "Kyodo News experienced LAN access failure from around 8:20 a.m. to shortly before noon. The Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun also had trouble with their LANs at their Tokyo and Osaka bureaus, but the problems did not affect editing or printing of their evening editions."
That was East Japan Railway. The crash was on Japan Rail West.
... but in case you're wondering if this may have caused the derailment at Amagasaki, apparently it didn't. Amagasaki is located in western Japan (covered by JR-West).
Still, the coincidence in time makes me wonder. I sure hope they don't use Windows in the train system I use... just read the EULA. My life is pretty "mission-critical" to me.
This has nothing to do with antivirus software. The driver was driving too fast. They don't have computers that run new software like this controlling the trains!
Let me wake you up.
Car manufacturers fight really hard to stop this from getting more of media attention, but modern cars are known to have SERIOUS software bugs. Just google car software bug or similar for stories and references - running 100MPH down a motorway and have the engine switched off, everything shut down (and even the steering wheel blocked), or having the central lock imprison you in the car, so you can't get out, or having random pieces of equipment (wipers, windows, chair adjustment) to start at random... These are real stories. Cars aren't what they used to be...
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
The different he's talking about with PHP is using mod_php as opposed to php.exe. If Apache uses mod_php, it goes out and hits php4.dll just like your asp.dll. If it's not using mod_php, it's going out and executing "php.exe %1" every time you hit a PHP page, waiting for the result, then sending it to the browser. This is much slower than the DLL approach.
You just need mod_php compiled in to Apache (the equivilent of ISAPI), *not* all of PHP, for this to work.
There was discussion on this on the Full-Disclosure mailing list when posters suspected that the 100% CPU usage on their computers was because of some new unknown virus.
A repesentative of Trend Micro Germany made a post to the thread where he explained the situation, apologized for it and offered pointers to their support database so that people could get the malfunctioning virus signatures uninstalled.