Information Technology Services is hoping to quickly resolve a campuswide computer problem after McAfee antivirus software caused computers nationwide to perpetually reboot yesterday afternoon.
ITS announced in an e-mail yesterday that a fix for the issue has been developed. The office is asking for a designate from each department or area to come to the ITS Helpdesk on the first floor of Job Hall between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. today to pick up a CD and the documentation for installing the patch.
Ed Fuller, associate vice president of ITS, said the problem is an issue with McAfee and not specific to the college’s network.
“It appears that it may be an issue with the McAfee virus scanning products that we use, ironically enough, for protecting ourselves from viruses,” Fuller said.
According to CNET News, a McAfee update of its virus software confused PCs’ immune systems yesterday, causing the software to attack legitimate operating system processes. CNET reported that at the University of Michigan’s medical school, 8,000 of its 25,000 computers crashed yesterday because of the update.
Peter Earle, multimedia laboratory technician for the Roy H. Park School of Communications, said the antivirus software was saying it was finding a virus when there was actually no virus to be found.
“The only way to eradicate it is to restart the system, but it was never going to get rid of it,” he said.
ITS began receiving complaints that campus computers were experiencing unexpected shutdowns and were continuously rebooting around 10:30 a.m.
Juan Arroyo, assistant professor of politics, said he experienced problems on his office computer.
“I started to work on a presentation for my next class, and my computer just kept turning itself off,” he said. “I asked the [politics] department administrator, and she was having the same problem.”
Fuller said PC users should contact the ITS Helpdesk if there are any further problems with their machine and check for updates from ITS on Intercom.
“We’re going to stay at it until we get it fixed,” he said.
