Vital DLLs flagged as malware disable Windows XP across China.
A serious false positive, caused by an erroneous update to
Symantec
‘s
Norton Anti-virus
product range issued late last week, has left thousands of Chinese computers in an unusable state.
Updates released on Thursday 17 May led the
Symantec
security software, including
Norton Internet Security
and
Norton 360
, to flag both
netapi32.dll
and
lsasrv.dll
as the ‘Haxdoor’ backdoor trojan, at least on certain Simplified Chinese language versions of
Windows XP SP2
, with certain patch levels. Users who shut down or rebooted after the update have found their machines blue-screening and will have to resort to serious restore methods to fix the problem and replace the quarantined or deleted files.
The Chinese Internet Security Response Team (CISRT) have dubbed the incident ‘Black Friday’ and called it ‘a terrible day’.
Symantec
reports releasing rapid fixes to the faulty update, but estimates of the numbers of users affected by the issue are in the tens of thousands, with local security firm
Rising
reporting 7,000 affected users contacting their support systems for advice.
‘Occasional false positives are inevitable in modern security software, with speedy response times and high levels of heuristics a requirement to keep up with the pace of malware development,’ said
John Hawes
, Technical Consultant at Virus Bulletin. ‘When an FP hits important system files, the consequences can be very serious for users, and this should serve as a reminder to all that thorough backups, of whole systems as well as important data, are a vital component in the battle to keep computers running in the face of any assault, be it malicious or accidental.’
A CISRT blog entry on the problem is
here
, with more information from
Rising
here
. Walk-throughs of a possible method for fixing broken systems, for Chinese readers, are
here
(from
Rising
) and
here
(from
Kingsoft
).
Just a day after this false positive incident, Chinese computer users were hit by another, less serious case, with
Kaspersky
products briefly alerting on a component of popular local AV software
Rising
– another CISRT blog entry is
here
.
Posted on 21 May 2007 by
Virus Bulletin
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