Virus Hits K-School Computers

The staff of the student computer laboratory at the Kennedy School of Government discovered a computer virus Monday that damaged files for the lab's IBM and IBM-compatible computers.

The widely publicized virus, called the "Friday the 13th" or "Columbus Day" virus, is a program written by an unknown "hacker" designed to become active on October 13. But it took time for the virus to reach the computers at the Kennedy School, said Yvonne Amundson, the PC lab coordinator.

"We noticed the virus on Monday, but it had been on our machines for at least a week or two before that," said H. Scott Samenfeld, director of computer services for the Kennedy School. "It probably found its way into our system from students carrying it on their disks."

The computer lab staff had the virus cleared out of the computers by Monday night.

"We did a great job," said Amundson. "Six of us stayed until 10:30 Monday night cleaning up all our hard drives and checking all the floppy disks."

The virus, which attaches itself to and ruins IBM files with ".EXE" and ".COM" suffixes, has often been found infecting the popular word processing program Wordperfect, Samenfeld said.

"Students are walking around with disks with infected Wordperfect programs," Samenfeld said. "It is an easy access point for the virus. We were successful in clearing the virus out of the lab, but that doesn't mean there aren't students who have it on their disks or on their hard drives now."

According to Amundson, all programs affected by the virus had to be deleted immediately. Since the computer lab had backups for all of the affected programs, the main impact of the virus was to make accessing a computer in the student lab more difficult.

"If even five of our computers have Wordperfect cleared, that's a pretty traumatic thing for students who have papers to write," Amundson said.

"The nuisance factor was substantial...but luckily there was no lasting damage," Samenfeld said.

In the wake of the virus, students using the lab are now required to check all disks they bring into the computer center for the virus, Samenfeld said.

The problems in the Kennedy School were restricted to the student computer center and did not spread to other machines at the school, Samenfeld said.

Amundson said that the walk-in computer at the Office of Information Technology (OIT) had previously discovered the same virus.

According to a user assisstant at the Science Center Computer Laboratory, there have been no problems with this particular IBM virus, but "we have Macintosh viruses on a regular basis."

Samenfeld said that computer users could protect against the virus by keeping backups of programs, making their programs write protected and checking all their files using a virus-finding program, like one available for free at the OIT.