She's a brick... computer

There is nothing better than paying to have your technology get bricked. If you don’t know what “bricking” is it basically means that the tech is so messed up that without some serious intervention on the users part is now a sweet looking paper weight. Apple updates used to brick iPhones, Sony updates have bricked PS3s the list goes on. Now usually the number of bricks is small, obviously if all the devices got bricked it would be a massive massive issue for these companies, companies who you pay to use their services, services that require that you have the most up to date software, or at least pester you till you update. This is even more annoying when the bricking is the result of a Virus scanner.

McAfee released an update this week that targeted and deleted the “svchost.exe” file that, well, basically lets windows XP run. This issue did not affect vista or win7 computers but it did affect windows XP which is he Os with the highest number of users total, but also the OS that is used in most corporations. Mine for instance. Once the svchost is deleted the computer will no longer boot up and requires the user to manually, from the command prompt, copy the file off the recovery cd and back into its home.

Now for a single consumer, especially one that is not super tech savvy, this is a tough thing to do, but its even worse when a whole companies computers are taken out.

There are more than a few things wrong with this situation. For starters who the hell did McAfee not test the update on any XP machine. McAfee provides the anti-virus software for corporation that pay them a lot of money to protect those corporations computers system, most of those corporations are XP shops so how did it not cross at least someone at McAfee’s mind to maybe test the release on XP! If this type of thing happened to say AVG who gives away their software for free to consumers (don’t think they do for businesses) it would still be unacceptable, but at least you did not have to pay for it. I think what irks me the most about this, is that anti-virus is required, at least on a Windows machine (don’t even bother trying to bring up the Mac here, if Apple was the number 1 OS for corporations we would be seeing this problem with them as well) especially if the users of said machines might click on links in emails or any of the other ways to infect your computer these days. Running without anti-virus in a corporation is a great way to make every IT Managers worst nightmare come true.

McAfee says they have fixed this issue and pushed out an updated that does not target the svchost file, but it might be too little too late. We will have to see how this all shakes out but I would bet that some heads will roll over at McAfee, and I would bet a lot of the affected corporations will be switching over to one of McAfee competitors.