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:Places of Wisdom?

[abh]

> upgrade to a more secure operating system. If you mean Linux, I assume you somehow are going to fund training all the students how to use it, along with getting all of the school's faculty and staff to support it, along with providing for Linux patch management efforts. Yeah, right. Back to the real world we go...

Say what?

[ldm]

"I think we really need to groom a new type of student who is responsible for their computer security," said Kathy Gillette, manager of George Mason University's beleaguered tech support center. "A lot of them lived at home and mom or dad took care of the computer so they've never learned how to fix them, but hopefully we'll be able to teach them that too."

*blink* I have yet to encounter a situation where a college-level student has their home computer taken care of by a parent... quite the opposite, usually. WTF?