Beginning Tuesday, Aug. 12, University faculty, staff and students were barraged with an onslaught of computer viruses and worms which have plagued the network in past weeks.
ITC currently is dealing with three viruses, although two have been the main focus.
"The virus Sobig.f is the worst," ITC Director of Security Coordination Shirley Payne said.
Sobig.f appears in inboxes with messages such as "Re: That Movie" and "Your details," with the virus attached to the message.
The second major virus, Demaru, is not as destructive as Sobig.f, Payne said.
"The message you get pretends to be from Microsoft.com and says 'use this patch immediately,'" she said. "Then they will give you an attachment and if you click on it, your machine will become infected."
In addition to these viruses, a dangerous worm, variously termed the "blaster" worm, infected computers across the country this month, including many on the University network.
"We've got 45,000 computers on the network," Payne said. "'Blaster' did get some computers pretty bad."
Computers running newer versions of Windows, which are susceptible to the worm, can be protected by downloading a patch from the Microsoft Web site.
"Our biggest concern is the number of machines out there that could be vulnerable," Payne said, citing the return of students and faculty as her chief worry regarding the worm's spread.
The difference between a virus and a worm as that viruses use e-mail to spread between computer systems, while worms may use e-mails but have other ways of getting into systems.
Scott Ruffner, head of the systems support group in the University Computer Science department, explained that a target computer being attacked by the worm has a program which receives requests from other computers on the network -- the technical equivalent of answering telephone calls.
"If you call that program and keep jamming data at it, eventually it will barf and fall through," he said. Once the attacking computer has gained access to the target machine, it plants "Trojan horse" programs files which appear to be system files which contain modified elements that allow access to the machine.
Viruses and worms may be difficult to spot because some viruses have changing subject lines and may reappear in different forms.
"Sobig.f is particularly nefarious because it has nine different subject lines," Payne said."It comes in many different forms."
Payne said the best way to protect your computer from a virus is to constantly update software and anti-virus equipment to combat the frequently-changing viruses and worms.
"The solution to this is
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