April 21 was a tough day for corporate IT Departments who partner with McAfee. Shortly before noon, companies throughout the world faced a full-blown meltdown of computers containing the Microsoft Windows XP operating system after receiving a faulty update from McAfee. The problem was quickly noticed at PC Construction as computers got caught in an endless reboot loop.

Unsure of the problem, our IT team instantly eliminated outside access to the Internet and shut down critical servers capable of transferring viruses.  All users were requested to power down their computers while IT tried to figure out what was impacting the PC Construction hardware. PC Construction’s IT team had a solid understanding of what had occurred to not only the PC Construction network system but also to corporations throughout the world within forty minutes.  Even though McAfee was not available for assistance, PC Construction began testing solutions to successfully restore the affected computers to their state before the McAfee patch was released. Servers were brought back online in preparation for a controlled restart of network services.  Within four hours (and prior to McAfee providing the solution), the entire PC Construction network was back up and running.    

Approximately 15% of PC Construction’s computers were infected with the faulty upgrade and all were able to be restored within two full days of the incident using an internally-developed program. Although the incident caused disruption to PC Construction’s business, the situation could have been much worse. I was proud of our team’s effort and success in returning the network back to a full functional state in such a timely fashion.

PC Construction's Information Technology Group