US School Districts Suffer Virus Attacks

Two school districts in the US have been struck by computer viruses during the 2nd week of May 2009. In the foremost incident, engineers are fighting to remove a sinister worm, which has repeatedly infected all the PCs at the Chariho School District situated in East Providence, Rhode Island, USA.

This school district also suffered from the Qbot virus during the same period (second week of May 2009). The worm captures users' sensitive data by copying or memorizing every keystroke after which it sends the stolen data to remote accomplices.

Thus, the school authorities have told administrators, teachers, students and support staff not to log-in any PC and members have been working without computers for over a week. The website of the school district has been offline since the malicious programs arrived.

A clean up session was launched in the district for 1,100 computers in the 2nd week of May 2009, but a new variant of the malware made its way into the PCs and spread fast among other systems, according to Bob Brigham, Manager of Tech Team Government Solutions Inc., a Portsmouth-based company working to rectify the problem, as reported by Projo on May 16, 2009.

Meanwhile, there is no evidence of the source responsible for introducing the infection into the district's computers, but it is believed that the malware made an entry when a person clicked on a malware-embedded e-mail or accessed an infected website.

At the Lodi Unified School District in California, USA, its PC server also collapsed on May 12, 2009 due to a virus, but everyone expected it to be repaired in a day's time (May 13, 2009).

Odie Douglas, Assistant Superintendent, Lodi School District, stated the attack brought down everything related to the Internet, including e-mail communications, as reported by tmcnet on May 14, 2009. However, Douglas said he couldn't tell the extent of cost the mishap would result for the district.

Computer virus attacks against school districts worldwide have been rapidly growing for a recent past, just as one that affected Vancouver school district of Canada in January 2009.

Related article: US Passes Baton to Asia in Spam Relay

» SPAMfighter News - 5/27/2009