Microsoft recently released a temporary fix for its Exchange Server email platform due to a date validation error at the end of the year, reminiscent of the famous Y2K bug in the year 2000. The new bug, nicknamed “Y2K22,’ brought corporate email servers to their knees starting on New Year’s Day 2022.
The Hacker News reports that over the weekend, tech giant Microsoft rolled out a temporary fix for its Exchange Server email platform. The fix was related to a date validation error that was linked to the end of the year, similar to the famous Y2K bug in the year 2000.
Microsoft in China (Pool/Getty)
In a blog post, Microsoft stated: “The problem relates to a date check failure with the change of the new year and it [is] not a failure of the [antivirus] engine itself. This is not an issue with malware scanning or the malware engine, and it is not a security-related issue. The version checking performed against the signature file is causing the malware engine to crash, resulting in messages being stuck in transport queues.”
The issue appears to impact versions of Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019, but Microsoft did not provide any official figures on how many servers may be affected by the issue. As the year 2022 arrived, servers were no longer able to deliver email messages providing the error message: “The FIP-FS ‘Microsoft’ Scan Engine failed to load. PID: 23092, Error Code: 0x80004005. Error Description: Can’t convert ‘2201010001’ too long.”
Microsoft stated that the error was caused by a date issue in a signature file used by the malware scanning engine in Exchange Server. Microsoft is recommending customers download a PowerShell scan engine reset script called “Reset-ScanEngineVersion.ps1” that can be executed on each Exchange mailbox server.
“The newly updated scanning engine is fully supported by Microsoft,” the company said. “While we need to work on this sequence longer term, the scanning engine version was not rolled back, rather it was rolled forward into this new sequence. The scanning engine will continue to receive updates in this new sequence.”
Read more at the Hacker News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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