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."

Comments

Re:Can ISPs get with it too?

[The_K4]

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 :)

Non-windows Students

[fupeg]

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.

We got hit by Nachi ...

[BabyDave]

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.

Re:Can ISPs get with it too?

[dexter riley]

ISP Guy: In that case, let me E-mail it to you.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Good for us?

[zbuffered]

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.