Wednesday, September 24, 2003
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Wednesday, September 24, 2003 |
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Schools' e-mail system, Web site back up after bug Fayette County Schools systems managers have finally rid the district’s computer network of the killer virus that first infected it nearly two weeks ago. The bug, designed to take advantage of a security flaw in Microsoft’s Windows 2000 and XP software systems, made the rounds across the planet but was especially cruel to the local schools, crashing the e-mail system and shutting down the central Web site. Ed Steil, formerly head of technology and now director of the Lafayette Educational Center, said schools had to be brought back online one by one as the virus was isolated and electronic security “patches” installed. The time-consuming task required a technician to manually download the software patch onto the harddrive of each computer, a daunting task considering Fayette County Schools have more than 5,200 computers on its network. The security patch was sent out by Microsoft in anticipation of the bug, since the weakness in its software systems had already been identified and reported in the tech world. But it wasn’t soon enough to keep the virus from invading the firewall of the school system’s main servers and opening the door to all kinds of unwanted transmissions. On a normal day, the school district processes about 22,000 legitimate communications, Steil said. On one day last week, more than 1 million files managed to slip through the firewall, effectively overwhelming the network and shutting it down. But Monday, things seemed to be back to normal with the school board’s Web site — www.fcboe.org — and e-mail was functioning again, at least for just about everybody. Melinda Berry-Dreisbach, school district public information officer, said her e-mail was still down Monday while everybody else at the central office was communicating just fine. But she works on a Macintosh, she said, while the rest of the network at the Board of Education is PC-based. “Something happens to my Mac every time technology takes us offline,” Berry-Dreisbach said Tuesday via e-mail, sent from a secretary’s computer.
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