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Universities Taken Offline to Fight Worms, Viruses
chrismg2003 writes "Nationwide universities are opening their doors to new students but closing off their network services. The Blaster worm has caused universities to take drastic actions to protect their campus networks. Universities have gone as far as shutting down their entire resnet network and bringing it back up dorm-by-dorm after each computer has been certified worm-free. The ICMP ping requests alone have brought down my university's resnet multiple times and we are scrambling to clean the worm from all computers before it forces us to follow suit with other universities."
If they shut down the campus networks, how will the students download all the music and movie files they need to start the semester off right? ;)
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
ISP Guy: Your coputers Infected, get a patch.
:)
Customer: I can't download the patch, you've turned off my internet access
That could be a problem
You should get a partial tuition refund if you don't use Windows, and thus the university's IT doesn't have to worry about you.
Aren't university students supposed to be intelligent?
Get your own free personal location tracker
At the university where I work, the main campus is in the middle of an XP rollout, and the builds being installed didn't have the patch applied. Hosed the network so badly that remote updating wasn't possible - all the techs have been frantically running around with patch disks for the last few days.
Fortunately, the campus where I'm based is mostly on Win 9x, and we managed to get most of the rest of them patched before many were infected. We thought that we'd got them all, but we were still seeing ridiculous ICMP traffic. The networking people checked the traffic logs, and the PCs were identified.
They belonged to two of the Technical Support staff.
ISP Guy: In that case, let me E-mail it to you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
About time for Apple to bust out with a new series of Switch ads.
Don't forget what happens off campus as well.
I'm connected to a WISP for my off campus internet, and they got taken totally offline by the worms. They eventually blacklisted all MAC addresses in the logs and went door-to-door with CDRs containing patches and removal tools. I feel sorry for them, because this was during the time when both a lot of people were logging on for the first time and they were installing more bandwidth, so they were torn three ways.
The result is that the "tweaking" that would have happened durning the week or so after move in is only now starting. The WiFi networks are still pressed by all the people on them. Everything (except, suspiciously, at their office) is slow, but getting better. DHCP in particular is down a lot. My ping and tracert commands are still blocked though.
One thing I've learned from this is that wireless networks do not fail gracefully under extreme loads, they just die. And, they allways die at night, after the office is closed, when you need to VPN into the campus network to start a program you have to use for your homework which is due the next morning. Or right now, when instead of posting when I press submit all the computer does is blink at me...
all of their TCO studies! This certainly puts the lie to their previous TCO studies!
Paranoia is merely a heightened sense of reality.
I always fight worms with bolt or ball spells, though you can clear them out by hand if you you have a potion of speed or a weapon that allows multiple attacks per round.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
After the main registration session ends, the university will release a custom DCOM worm of their own. After infecting an unpatched machine, it automatically contacts the university's online registration site and unregisters the student from all of their classes. Students who come back to re-register afterwards will be required to wear Microsoft Bob t-shirts for the next two weeks, and perform community service consisting of 20 hours staffing the IT department's Help Desk.
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
Is all the extra work that these worms and what not are causing for us IT folks, good for our industry in general? Certainly it keeps us busy just keeping everything running, and that's gotta keep a few people on the payroll.
If that's the case, I'd like to send a shout-out to all the virus and worm authors out there: you infect my computer and I'll pop a cap in yo azz, but as long as you just infect the clueless newbies, and it helps me separate them from their cash, I give you the thumbs up.
Synergy is your friend