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."

Comments

Sounds familiar.

[bigtallmofo]

The buggy file slowed down computer performance substantially by making CPUs run at almost full capacity, the software company said.

Sounds like every interactively-scanning antivirus program I've ever installed. I wonder, when Microsoft releases server benchmarks, if they run them with antivirus software running in the background? I think this would give a 10%-15% edge to operating systems that don't require such measures of protection.

Re:The problem with AV

[mikeumass]

Less market share. Windows is a much more apetizing market. Especially since most users wouldn't know if they had a trojan in the first place. How many people actually renew thier subscriptions with Norton or NA?

Why AntiVirus?

[MindStalker]

What I want to know is why do the computers controlling the train system in Japan need antivirus. Are they attached to the internet? Do they have disk drives? This system should have neither, I can understand the reason for a seperated system to be connected to the net for reporting train schedules and problems. But connecting a control system like that? Running it on windows? Silly. Thats worse than having antivirus on an ATM.

Re:Why AntiVirus?

[guy-in-corner]

Even if a computer system isn't connected to the Internet, you can guarantee that -- if it's connected to any kind of network infrastructure -- some idiot is going to jack their laptop into it, or plug a USB key into one of the PCs.

This is how viruses can get onto supposedly 'private' networks.

It takes a significant amount of effort from the IT guys to harden a system against this -- managed switches, Windows group policy. They're guaranteed to forget something.

The right thing to do is to disable the AV updates over the Internet, and use internal update servers (assuming that your AV solution supports it).

This means that you can validate the AV software on a test rig before it ends up on mission-critical production kit.

Re:Who's to blame

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Software design is still a pretty young field of construction. Building construction has had more than 2 millenia to develop, while software design had about century (give or take a decade). In the early days (read: centuries) buildings were designed by rules of thumb. Only the last few centuries the real science of contruction was developed. (The metalurgical properties of steel wasn't researched until after WW2 when they figured out that welded ships couldn't handle the extreme cold of northern seas very well) In software design we're at the point where we're trying to come up with the science, but are still mostly using rules of thumb.

Given time software will reach a point where it's about as reliable as concrete buildings, but in the mean time we'll be stuck with the many kinds of blue screens.

It should be part of the TCO

[RoLi]

Exactly. This is just part of the cost of running Windows. Any serious TCO-analysis should include the cost to purchase, install and update anti-virus software on Windows.