[dbaust] Norton Internet Security antivirus update 'borked Internet Explorer'
- From: "Peter Tarrant" <tarrp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <dbaust@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2015 11:37:38 +1100
Norton Internet Security antivirus update 'borked Internet Explorer'
Snafu forced hapless users onto OTHER BROWSERS
internet explorer 8
21 Feb 2015 at 19:55, Gareth Corfield
Users of the world's second best* browser were forced to use alternatives
after an overnight update to Norton AntiVirus prevented Internet Explorer
from working at all.
Aggrieved users who'd thought far enough ahead to install Google Chrome,
Mozilla Firefox or any of the other alternatives took to Norton's official
forum to vent their spleens.
"Sometime this evening, IE11 started crashing. In fact, it crashed an
already-open browsing session, and now trying to start it up just instantly
causes a 'Internet Explorer Has Stopped Working' error," wrote support forum
contributor Sunfox, sparking an 11-page thread.
Forumites shortly figured out that an update to Norton Internet Security 360
had broken something critical relating to IE, with monkeynuts posting:
I have uninstalled NIS and IE started working. Then reinstalled NIS, and
once the patch was deployed IE started crashing again.
Tales of woe, heartbreak and downloads of new browsers spread, until about
0400 GMT, at which point a member of Symantec staff posted: "Kindly run
manual live update (right click on Norton icon on tray notification area >
'Run live update ')," helpfully adding "Kindly stop using work-arounds."
At which point all seemed to be well, judging by the forum posts from then
on. Various Reg readers whose machines had auto-updated overnight then wrote
to us to let us know what had happened.
El Reg has contacted Symantic, owners of the Norton brand, for comment and
will update this story if we hear back from them.
Users still affected by the snafu are advised to re-run Norton LiveUpdate. R
Bootnote
Google Chrome overtook IE as the world's biggest browser by market share in
summer 2014. The more you know.
** A previous headline on this story mis-identified the affected product as
Norton 360.
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