'Vicious' virus strikes almost all of NIC's computers

COEUR d’ALENE — Sick computers have North Idaho College officials in crisis mode.

Information Technology department staff are scrambling to contain and remove a virus that has affected an estimated 90 percent of the college’s 1,200 computers since it began infecting machines last week.

“This virus stream is pretty serious,” said college spokeswoman Stacy Hudson. “This is a very intelligent and highly spreadable virus.”

Hudson said employee and student records are safe with no breach of sensitive information.

“This particular virus does not destroy files, but it’s a vicious strain,” Hudson said. “It uses files to propogate and multiply itself.”

It started Feb. 2 when staff and faculty members began experiencing error messages and problems when using certain programs.

More and more computers began losing functionality as the IT team worked around the clock to identify the problem.

Employees and students arrived on campus Monday to find signs posted on every building warning them not to power up their computers until they are scanned and cleaned.

Hudson said students, for the most part, have been unaffected since the virus attacked mainly faculty and staff login processes.

Classes have not been canceled and college operations have continued.

“We’ve remained productive,” said Karen Hubbard, an employee in the Human Resources department.

Hubbard said by Thursday half her department’s computers were down, but they did their jobs by sharing working machines and then worked on manual files.

This particular virus, identified over the weekend as two different strains of the same virus, virut.bm and virut.bh, does not appear to have targeted the college specifically.

A previous strain is suspected to have originated in Russia, Hudson said. They don’t know how it found its way to NIC.

The only way to eradicate the virus is to power off all machines and then bring them back on line one at a time after each has been scanned and cleaned using a program patch just created by Microsoft specifically for this strain.

“We were notified by them that we were one of a dozen or so organizations that was attacked by this virus, in the world,” Hudson said. “They didn’t even have the fix for it yet.”

All college computers have been placed on lockdown until a virus recovery team can scan each computer and run the new cleaning program.

It takes from 30 minutes to 2 hours to clean each computer. 

The process is ongoing, and the team is placing green tags on safe computers that have been scanned and cleaned.

Officials warn not to power up any computer with a red tag because it still poses a risk.

Thumb drives used to download information from any of the computers could also be infected. Computers on the main campus and its outreach centers are involved in the outbreak.

If the cleaning process goes according to schedule, Hudson estimates all 1,200 machines owned by NIC will be cured of the virus by the end of the week.

Updates are being posted on the college’s Web site three times a day as the cleaning process continues.

Information: www.nic.edu.