Antivirus flaw causes weekend shenanigans

Trend Micro has apologised to customers after a software error in its antivirus package stumped computers over the weekend.

The company released an antivirus signature file at around midnight GMT on Saturday. But a flaw caused major problems, notably running the CPU at maximum speeds and causing computers with XP SP2 installed to freeze.

"We sincerely apologise for this incident and will continue to improve processes so that problems such as this do not happen in the future," said the company in a statement.

"For any customers experiencing instability, Trend Micro has provided a set of solutions which can be found under the Support section of our website.

"Additionally, Trend Micro has extended support hours especially to help those customers who had this special intersection of circumstances and were affected by this issue."

Although the update was only live for 90 minutes before being pulled, it affected Trend's OfficeScan and PC-cillin products as well as ServerProtect for NT and two of its small business packages, Client/Server Suite for SMB and Client/Server/Messaging Suite for SMB.

The signature file was designed to seek out variants of the Rbot worm. Experts have described Rbot as a tremendously powerful hacking tool.