UPJ Finding Origin of Virus Attack

Authorities at the UPJ {University of Pittsburgh's Johnstown (USA)} have been trying to analyze a PC worm after its infection significantly reduced the speed of Internet access at the campus.

While experts have largely resolved the problems, they are still continuously making efforts to locate the attack's 'source of origin' following its emergence on November 10, 2009.

Around 5 am, people of the IT team found that the network had a foreign element that was eating up bandwidth significantly. Consequently, the worm congested the networks to such an extent that information flow slowed down to a crawl.

It became necessary to close the school's PC lab due to the worm, and lab-based classes had to be canceled. However, students in general didn't complain of any data loss or trouble on their PCs.

Bob Knipple, Director of Alumni and Community Relations at UPJ, said that he truly lauded the university's IT staff for detecting the virus so quickly, otherwise as it could have led to serious consequences, as reported by The Tribune Democrat on November 15, 2009.

The Director added that in the absence of the staff's prompt action, the virus could have crippled the campus' whole IT infrastructure.

The University officials state that it isn't yet clear if the malware assault started from inside the campus or triggered from somewhere outside it.

However, the University website has issued a reminder to everyone that they must install an up-to-date virus scan program to ward off any infection on their systems, adding that doubtful e-mail attachments mustn't be opened.

According to the Internet security specialists, computer virus assaults along with phishing scams have been targeting universities in large numbers, duping people into revealing their private information, particularly usernames and passwords of university web-mails. Furthermore, they are well arranged and in several instances, faster than security specialists are able to react against.

One of the recent attacks on universities is the University of Delaware assault during the 1st week of November 2009 when campus students received e-mails that asked for user IDs and passwords of their school Web-mail accounts.

Related article: UBS Employee Faces Sentence For Planting ‘Logic Bomb’

» SPAMfighter News - 11/25/2009