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Opinion
The Calm Before the Calm?
8/9/2007
- At Auburn University, lines of students wrapped around support offices two weeks after the Blaster worm first struck, initially downing the residential network.
- Temple University provided students with free anti-virus software, which--along with 90,000 warning e-mails and 27,00 paper flyers--is probably why only 400 of 35,000 student computers appear to have been infected.
- Duke University was set up to filter out virus-laden e-mail (successfully filtering 2.5 million), and only a handful of machines on campus got infected.
- Harvard University puts incoming e-mail through a virus filter: In its arts and sciences department, 36,000 infected messages were stopped in the first nine hours of the software's implementation.
- Brown University's network registration tool scanned newly connected machines and instructed the owners without needed patches and updates to go get them; that was about half of all students.
- George Mason University cut off all residence hall access to 3,600 students for a while after many students failed to sign statements that they had run anti-virus software and placed patches.
- At Columbia University a system-wide spam filter protected computers from viruses; even so consultants were also busy working in the dorms with student machines on site. Owing to strong rules on computer user rights, however, student computers at Columbia and Barnard were not quarantined from the network.
- At the University of Maryland, returning students going into the network were directed to a website telling them to apply patches for the Blaster worm; those who did not do so within a fixed period of time were kicked off the network.
- At the University of Virginia, about 800 student-owned machines were kicked out of the network by security "bots" and were not allowed back in until obtaining CDs and loading up on protection.
- Oberlin College suffered "near meltdown" Aug. 21 owing to students returning to campus with infected computers: Nine out of 10 Windows machines were infected.
- University of North Texas was cleaning off 16 computers every hour and a half ... and charging students $30 to do it. Students were not permitted to log into the network without first proving they had clean computers.
- Vanderbilt University shut down connections to 1,200 computers after finding out that as many as one-fourth of all student computers were infected. It took days to get service to them all turned back on.
- Salisbury University shut its residential network completely down for a day, this after a two-week period spent cleaning off 500 university computers.
- MIT shut off service to infected computers and blocks traffic to and from suspected machines.
- At the University of Illinois, a team of 30-plus network technicians worked on students' desks to patch and check student computers in the residence halls. Some students faced a week's delay in getting permission to get connected.
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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