The company said yesterday that a virus pattern file distributed to some customers late Friday could, when running on certain operating systems, eat up 100% of the CPU time, causing machines to freeze up or crash.
Trend’s share price dropped 3.3% on the Nasdaq and 4.2% in Tokyo as investors worried about the effect the incident could have on the company’s brand and sales.
We are currently estimating the effect of the trouble on our consolidated business results for the second quarter of the fiscal year ending December 2005 as well as to our business forecast, the company said in a statement.
Reports out of Europe suggested that Trend will compensate affected customers, many of which were forced to bring support staff in over the weekend to fix affected machines, but a company spokesperson would not confirm or deny that.
The problem came about due to a pattern file that was made available for download to users of Trend’s OfficeScan, PC-cillin and ServerProtect antivirus products for about 90 minutes on Friday, starting at 11.30pm GMT.
If the customers were running the software on the latest versions of Windows, the pattern file could cause the antivirus to consume all the computer’s processor time, making it essentially unusable.
It affected a subset of a subset of our customers. Typically, they were running Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2, said a Trend spokesperson. We do apologize to all our customers who were affected.
The spokesperson said the problem hit hardest in Japan, where Trend is the leading antivirus brand, but that it was experienced globally. While the buggy file was downloaded a reported 350,000 times, Trend does not know how many users were affected.
Specifically, the pattern file in question was designed to introduce heuristics to detect the prolific RBot family of worms. More specifically, the problem was in the implementation of UltraProtect decompression.
Trend’s quality assurance procedures failed to catch the problematic file before it was delivered to customers. Trend’s spokesperson said the large number of viruses hitting the internet nowadays puts antivirus firms under pressure to offer protection quickly.
We’re going to have to find a more appropriate balance between the speed of our updates with the quality and stability our customers require, he said.
