Symantec virus signature disabled critical system files in Chinese PCs, crippling Windows XP for millions of users.

Millions of Chinese PCs running Symantec Corp. antivirus software have been incapacitated by a faulty virus signature distributed last week, government media reported Sunday.

A virus-signature update delivered automatically to users on Friday about 1:00 a.m. Beijing time to Symantec’s antivirus scanning engine mistook two critical system files of the Simplified Chinese edition of Windows XP Service Pack 2 for a Trojan horse. The two files — netapi32.dll and lsasrv.dll — were falsely quarantined, which in turn crippled Windows. If an affected PC was rebooted, Windows failed on start-up and showed only a blue screen.

Full Story Via PC World

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