A glitch in McAfee security software wreaked havoc on Wednesday morning in the county, when 1,650 computers in the county’s school system had to be immediately shutdown.

McAfee’s update detected an Svchost.exe update, a harmless generic host process for programs operating from Windows, as a virus. This caused all computers linked in with the Kentucky Department of Education to constantly shutdown and try to reboot.

The problem affected all machines running Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 3 installed on them.

According to Computer Operations Supervisor Jerrod Graybeal, power had to be turned off to all machines in the county’s school system.

Graybeal explained on Friday that 550 machines were affected by the glitch, but assured no data was lost due to the glitch.

By the end of the day on April 23 all machines should be back up and running.

“Wednesday morning some machines in the district were receiving virus alerts,” Graybeal advised, “where McAfee was detecting specific files as a virus. At that point we were not for sure how many were affected. When we found out the problem was wide scale we contacted all technicians to turn off the non-critical machines to prevent them from being affected. There are 1,650 machines in the system. It was a glitch with McAfee. The most current file had an issue with detecting a windows system inaccurately as a virus.”

KDE’s computer system ties all public schools together in the state. There are set standards that all machines must abide by. If KDE’s master McAfee update server gets updated, all computers in KDE receive the same update.

“The server in the district is managed by us, but controlled by KDE,” Graybeal mentioned. “As soon as KDE realized what the problem was, they terminated the updates. By the end of the day on Thursday we still had 150 machines still not online. But by the end of the day (Friday) we should be 100 percent up and running. Daily operations were definitely affected. Most of the work was on the food service staff. They had to go back to paper and pencil noting charges for students. What helped the secretaries and attendance clerks was their overall knowledge of the students by interacting with them.”

According to the Grayson County E-911 office, the only other machines affected in the county were the National Crime Information Center computers. The McAfee issue did not affect the other machines emergency personnel use on a daily basis.

For more information about the false positive problem visit http://www.mcafee.com/us/about/false_positive_response.html.