Virus variant causes outage on network

Following the previous week's network outage on the south end of campus, a variant of the Agobot virus brought down the campus network Saturday morning, Jan. 24.

The first sign of trouble came on Monday, Jan. 19, when the entire network experienced a mysterious, yet significant slowdown for about four hours. Although this impediment resolved itself, the EMU network and Web site came crashing down sometime early Saturday morning.

It was later discovered that the outage was caused by a buildup of malformed packets of data in the network servers' RAM. Once the servers' memory filled with this "bad data", they ceased to handle network traffic.

At 1:15 p.m. on Saturday, all network activity to and from the dorms was disabled as technicians traced the outage to the malformed packets. By 4:00 p.m., the infected computers were identified and disconnected from the network, and the rest of the campus came back online.

Technicians were uncertain of how the virus that caused students' computers to create the malformed packets could have penetrated the firewall, but the Information Systems department is working individually with owners of infected computers to restore their network connection and prevent further damage.