Microsoft releases emergency fix for Exchange year 2022 bug

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Microsoft releases emergency fix for Exchange year 2022 bug

Microsoft has released an emergency fix for a year 2022 bug that is breaking email delivery on on-premise Microsoft Exchange servers.To get more latest news about microsoft, you can visit shine news official website.

As the year 2022 rolled in and the clock struck midnight, Exchange admins worldwide discovered that their servers were no longer delivering email. After investigating, they found that mail was getting stuck in the queue, and the Windows event log showed one of the following errors.These errors are caused by Microsoft Exchange checking the version of the FIP-FS antivirus scanning engine and attempting to store the date in a signed int32 variable.

However, this variable can store only a maximum value of 2,147,483,647, which is less than the new date value of 2,201,010,001 for January 1st, 2022, at midnight.Due to this, when Microsoft Exchange attempts to check the AV scanning version, it would generate a bug and cause the malware engine to crash.

"The version checking performed against the signature file is causing the malware engine to crash, resulting in messages being stuck in transport queues," Microsoft explained in a blog post.Microsoft has released a temporary fix requiring customer action while working on an update that automatically fixes the issue.

This fix comes in the form of a PowerShell script named 'Reset-ScanEngineVersion.ps1.' When executed, the script will stop the Microsoft Filtering Management and Microsoft Exchange Transport services, delete older AV engine files, download the new AV engine, and start the services again.After running the script, Microsoft says that email will start delivering again, but it may take some time to complete depending on the amount of email that was stuck in the queue.

Microsoft also explains that the new AV scanning engine will be version number 2112330001, which references a date that does not exist and that admins should not be concerned.

"The newly updated scanning engine is fully supported by Microsoft. 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," explained Microsoft.

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