Bug cripples Microsoft exchange

PAPUA New Guinea and the rest of the world were hit by the “Year 2022” (Y2K22) bug that crippled Microsoft emails.
Apparently, Microsoft failed to anticipate the bug as it did during the switch from 2019 to 2020 and was caught with its pants down.
Microsoft exchange on-premise servers could not deliver email starting on Jan 1, due to the Y2K22 bug in the FIP-FS anti-malware scanning engine.
Starting with Exchange Server 2013, Microsoft enabled the FIP-FS anti-spam and anti-malware scanning engine by default to protect users from malicious email.
According to numerous reports from Microsoft Exchange admins worldwide, a bug in the FIP-FS engine is blocking email delivery with on-premise servers starting at midnight Jan 1.
Security researcher and exchange administrator Joseph Roosen said the problem was caused by Microsoft using a signed int32 variable to store the value of a date, which has a maximum value of 2,147,483,647.
However, dates in 2022 have a minimum value of 2,201,010,001 or larger, which is greater than the maximum value that can be stored in the signed int32 variable, causing the scanning engine to fail and not release mail for delivery.
When this bug is triggered, an 1106 error will appear in the Exchange Server’s Event Log stating, “The FIP-FS Scan Process failed initialisation. Error: 0x8004005. Error Details: Unspecified Error” or “Error Code: 0x80004005. Error Description: Can’t convert “2201010001” to long.”
Microsoft will need to release an Exchange Server update that uses a larger variable to hold the date to officially fix this bug. However, for on-premise Exchange Servers currently affected, the administration have found that the FIP-FS scanning engine could be disabled to allow email to start delivering again.
– Agencies