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| Viruses, worm hit campus computers, Internet |
By David Forbes
Senior Staff Writer |
Many on-campus students lost online access Friday
due to a series of computer viruses and ‘worms’, as incoming
students failed to protect their computers.
As of press time, online access had not been fully restored.
The campus computer networks were first hit hard last Wednesday,
when problems caused by a series of worms and viruses forced the
network down for nearly a day.
Access was lost again Friday, as incoming students failed to follow
instructions to protect their computers by downloading a “patch”
that would protect them from the viruses before they registered
for online access.
“We had ten percent of the computers coming online in the residence
halls getting infected, that side of the campus kind of killed themselves,”
said Jeff Williams, director of Information Technology Services
Monday.
In response, Williams said, the residence halls had to be shut off
from the rest of the network until the problems could be solved.
“The problem that is in front of us is that we’ve got
5,500 students moving into the dorms,” said Douglas B. May,
director of Academic Computing Services Friday. “About 98 percent
of students bring computers with them. All it takes is 50 to 100
infected machines and it will spew out enough traffic to bring the
network to its knees.”
Online access is still available to students at computer labs around
campus.
Students said that they were disappointed by the lack of internet
access.
“It sucks. My roommate and I are both graphic arts majors,
we run a web comic that we haven’t been able to update in several
days,” said Christy S. Lennox, a Junior graphic arts major.
“We also haven’t been able to communicate with our friends
as much, we’ve been forced to watch TV.”
Lennox said, however, that she didn’t really blame the university
for the problems.
“This is just a difficulty. Something like this just has to
be dealt with, it’s not really anyone’s fault.
Appalachian’s computer problems, Williams said, stemmed from
two separate “worms” or viruses that use other computers
to spread.
The first worm, called “Blaster” uses a flaw in most versions
of Microsoft’s Windows operating system to get into a user’s
computer, and then shuts it down within 60 seconds, according to
information available on Microsoft’s website.
Blaster has been hitting computer networks nationwide.
But most of the problems, Williams said, started with the “Nachi”
worm, a “good” worm created to download and updates to
fix the Blaster worm.
“The problem was, Nachi used the wrong link, so it was just
out there on the network, looking for a link that wasn’t there.
The network became so busy from Nachi that we couldn’t get
to critical servers and had to shut the network down [Wednesday],”
Williams said. |
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