This morning, I spoke with Tom Morrison, director of academic computing and network services at Montana State University, about yesterday’s McAfee bug.
Someone in the newsroom heard yesterday that the bug was causing some problems for computers at MSU, which runs McAfee virus scan software on many of its computers.
“For the university as a whole, there was really fairly minimal impact,” Morrison said. “We think, overall, there were only about 100 machines affected on campus.”
That’s out of the roughly 5,000 university-owned machines on campus — and it doesn’t count the innumerable student-owned machines, which may have had problems with the McAfee update that Morrison didn’t know about.
MSU run its own McAfee update server, Morrison said, and it doesn’t publish an update until it’s been tested by IT staff members. So the update that turned out to be so problematic was never actually pushed out to users, he said.