Sophos and Citrix software are affected by bug fixes for the 2024 leap year.

Spledding year flaws have had an impact on Citrix and Sophos products, which has caused unanticipated issues with those products.

The Gregorian calendar measures a year in 365 days, while the astronomical year has 365.24 days, which solves the synchronization issue. To correct this discrepancy, an additional day is added to February, the 29th, during leap years.

The leap-year approach can, however, lead to issues with computer systems because software may not be able to account for the extra day, leading to unanticipated errors.

Citrix experienced a bug known as the “leap year bug.”

The vendor’s support forums reported earlier today that the Citrix HDX HTML5 Video Redirection Service had stopped functioning on all Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA ) machines at the first indication of problems.

The service is used in remote work, education, content delivery, and multimedia applications as part of Citrix’s virtualization suite. Playback optimizations that redirect HTML5 video processing from the server to the client improve the user experience when streaming video content into a virtual desktop or app session.

Users reported that environments with various configurations were affected by the service termination, which was in accordance with a problem that was first identified on a thread created on February 29, 2020, the year the last leap year occurred.

Soon, users realized they were dealing with a leap-year bug that was causing unanticipated behavior and made the connection between today’s date and the thread’s creation.

Some users suggested quickly restarting the Citrix service without rebooting and setting the system date to February 28th, 2024, which reportedly worked.

Managing multiple servers must manually change the time change for each of the impacted endpoints, which makes rebooting servers potentially dangerous.

Finally, Citrix responded to the user reports by issuing a bulletin in which it stated that the issue was only resolved after the VDA restarted, with the vendor suggesting the following workaround until a permanent fix is ready:

1. Stop the timer so that it does n’t update itself automatically to the correct date.
2. Change the date to March 1, 2024.
3. The Citrix HDX HTML5 Video Redirection Service, or CtxHdxWebSocketService, is stopped and started.
4. Restart the time service.

Users can also run the following command as an administrator through an elevated command prompt:

net stop w32time & date 03-01-2024 & net start CtxHdxWebSocketService & net start w32time

Users wo n’t experience this issue during the following leap year, on February 29th, 2028, according to Citrix, which claims its engineering team is working on a fix for the issue.

This “glitch” may resolve itself tomorrow, March 1st, 2024, but it’s not certain whether it’ll cause a persistent hang that wo n’t be fixed until an official fix is released.

Sophos had an even bigger impact.

If devices are rebooted on February 29, 2024, Sophos also announced that Sophos Endpoint, Sophos Server, and Sophos Home may experience issues with unexpected security certification validation warnings for HTTPS websites.

If the antivirus software’s” SSL/TLS decryption of HTTPS websites” setting is set to” SSL/TLS decryption of HTTPS websites,” the contents of which can be scanned for malicious scripts, is disabled. For all users of the security software, this feature is automatically disabled.

The vendor has provided a number of solutions to the impacted products, as follows.

For all customers, Sophos automatically disable SSL/TLS decryption to prevent issues, according to Sophos Endpoint -&nbsp. Users should revert any manual decryption settings after this is fixed by an upcoming software update.
• Sophos Server version 2023.1.x– From March 1st, 2024, restarting the servers will resolve the issue, and settings can be changed as desired.
• Sophos Server versions 2023.2. x -&nbsp: Sophos has disabled SSL/TLS decryption via policy override for all. Users should subsequently change their settings if they had manually disabled decryption because a software update is planned to reverse this change.
• Users who encounter issues should turn off SSL/TLS decryption, Sophos Home -&nbsp. On or after March 1st, 2024, it is advised to reboot and re-enable decryption settings.

Problems involving leap years worldwide

The leap year has resulted in a number of computer problems around the world today, with the most notable being an outage at Allied Petroleum‘s self-service fueling&nbsp stations in New Zealand.

Sweden’s largest grocery store, ICA, is another victim of a leap year glitch, according to reports that the company has been unable to accept card payments as of today due to an internal issue brought on by the date.

Additionally, according to reports from Japan, the leap year has prevented four prefectures from issuing driver’s licenses, making it necessary for the authorities to make an emergency transition to non-impacted systems.