Trend Micro Payout Didn't Come Ashore
The problem cost Trend Micro's bottom line $8 million. Trend Micro funded ads in Japanese newspapers to inform home users about the nature of the glitch and how to remediate it, as well as support costs due to increasing call center volume. At one point, that volume increased 100 times, said Trend Micro CFO Mahendra Negi, in an e-mail message.
Those charges sunk Trend Micro's second-quarter earnings outlook by about 17 percent, according to the Tokyo-based company which has offices in Cupertino, Calif.
The faulty update was only available for download from about 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. PST Friday, April, 22. Nearly 5,000 customers in the United States, Asia and Australia were affected, a spokesperson said. However, the bulk of the damage was reportedly felt in Japan, where Trend Micro is the leading antivirus software vendor.
This seems to match reports from the U.S. channel. Wes Parker, sales representative at Stalwart Systems, a $2.3 million security solution provider and Trend Micro partner in Charlotte, N.C., said his company was "not impacted at all" by the faulty update. Parker said only one customer called to inquire about the news of the faulty update back in April, but that Stalwart spend no time remediation any problems as a result.
Tom MacArthur, principal of Storbase, a Waltham, Mass.based solution provider and Trend Micro reseller, said he had not gotten any calls from his customers complaining about effects from the faulty Trend Micro update.
The update, a downloadable pattern file, was meant to help customers thwart attacks by "bot" viruses, specifically those in the WORM_RBOT family, a spokesperson said.
However, the pattern file wasn't properly tested and ended up disrupting many of the systems that downloaded it, causing CPUs to run code in a loop, eating up processing power and slowing the computing process, according to Trend Micro.
Computers running Trend Micro's PC-cillin, OfficeScan or ServerProtect security software were most vulnerable to the effects of the pattern file, and most of the affected systems were running Windows XP that had been upgraded with Service Pack 2, the Trend Micro spokesperson said.