Trend Micro customers suffer weekend mayhem

[whatthe]

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5...=zdfd.newsfeed

The Japan-based antivirus company has promised to compensate customers whose computers running Windows XP Service Pack 2 were disabled by the update. The company said the update was only available for 90 minutes, but IT workers are angry.

It will be interesting to see what the compensation process includes?

http://www.trendmicro.com/en/support...4/overview.htm

[Striek]

And then people wonder why they should ghost their computers...

Buy identical hardware, make an image every week, and when something like this happens, it's a simple matter of ghosting a set of machines over a network. It may take time and effort to implement such a setup, but when something like this happens, suddenly it's worth it.

Updating software also becomes a simple matter of updating one machine, imaging it, and then deploying that image network-wide.

But what do I know?

[nihil]

Indeed it will be interesting..................that would have hit me if I had been running my XP box

I can see Trend grovelling to larger corporate customers, but what about SOHO and private individuals?

Just a thought?

[halv]

nihil,

it is about the company's reputation. If alot of home users were hit by this and they do nothing to help those users, I doubt the big companies that use their AV product would continue to renew their subscription.

I imagine that alot of those companies end users use the same AV at their home that they use at the office (I know that at the company that I used to work for, I was ask about what we used and why).


I'll have to watch to see what they offer the home users that got hit by this.

~Halv

[nihil]

Hi halv,

Yes, there is that consideration but I also see a practical one.

Corporates who had IT staff working on the problem or who had to pay staff to do nothing can quite easily make a claim based on their payroll.

Little guys and private individuals generally have to sort it in their own time...............how do you compensate for that.

Hmmmmmmmmm, I think that there might be one or two QA and developers jobs going at Trend right now

[|3lack|ce]

<- got hit by it. Here's how I fixed:

Booted from my ghost cd, replaced current image with the ghost, didn't update Trend when it offered to do so - all is well. Time lost - negligable. Do I complain about or to Trend? No - everyone makes mistakes. So long as they don't happen very often, I'm happy.

Will QA's lose their jobs? Most likely - they 'green stamped' the definitions when they came through instead of testing them thoroughly. Odds are they were busy watching something on TV or gaming instead of doing their jobs - common in any computer firm on the weekend when the boss isn't around.

[whatthe]

It will no doubt be hard for the little guys. A lot of times the steps small users have to go through to get things straightened out take more time than it takes to fix them.

[nihil]

Hmmm,

I just noticed something mildly interesting, the desktop stuff seems to have hit WinME and XP SP2, I am wondering what they have in common. Restore points perhaps?

Another thing, I don't have that much sympathy for the big corporates who are whining...........they must have let it through without testing on a single "reference machine" At least the small guy has the valid excuse that he doesn't have a reference machine? he just has his production box.

[Tiger Shark]

This has been all over ISC for 3 or 4 days now... The corporate solution sounds fun... especially the "albeit slowly" part....

As for ghosting and restoring the image... It works great on the home network but I wouldn't the overhead on my 650 machines on a weekly basis... Nor would I want to have to reimage them all.. There has to be a creative way to disable the Trend AV and live without it for a while.... How hard can the mitigation be for not having client AV's running?

[Striek]

I can ghost a lab of over 100 computers in under 4 hours. Multicast is my friend. Don't know if it would be realistic outside of a lab setting, though.

Granted, if every workstation used a seperate image the process would be rather arduous.

The key is the *identical hardware* part. Most machines can then be restored from a single image. User specific settings can be kept on a fileserver. I guess licensing may become a problem in some places, though.