CA Inc. caused some headaches this week after its antivirus software inadvertently flagged part of the Windows OS as malware. The SANS Internet Storm Center reported the problem Friday saying that an overnight update to CA"s eTrust Antivirus signatures had caused the software to flag a security-related process in Windows as malicious. The faulty update caused some Windows 2003 servers to crash and become unusable, SANS said.
The problem was that eTrust Antivirus was mistakenly flagging the Windows Lsass.exe process, said Bob Gordon, a CA spokesman. "CA quickly discovered and fixed an issue which temporarily caused some customers to detect a problem in their Lsass.exe files," he said in an e-mail. According to Gordon, it took CA less than seven hours to fix the mix-up. The problem was introduced in the 30.3.3054 update, released at 2:53 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST) and fixed in the 30.3.3056 update, which was issued at 9:34 a.m. EST. CA"s latest updates are online.