The SOBig virus, named for its enormity, has potentially infected several thousand computers connected to ResNET as of last night, flooding Orangemail in-boxes and eventually causing a breakdown in the Orangemail system.

In response, Computing and Media Services has hired extra personnel to help deal with the overload of problems caused by the SOBig virus, the Blaster worm and increased SPAM. The effort, which costs an estimated $25,000 per week, is funded by students’ ResNET fees and the CMS budget.

CMS personnel, including those specifically hired to combat the viruses, will be available to help students in residence halls every day for the next week.

‘This has never happened before,’ said Ben Ware, vice president of researching and computing. ‘We’ve never had this level of infection on student machines.’

Essentially, two problems are plaguing the CMS network.

This weekend, CMS officials identified six student computers that were generating more than 1,000 pieces of SPAM each. The e-mails were allegedly unintentional and were soliciting prescription and non-prescription drugs. CMS shut down the computers within several hours, but the computers were still responsible for this weekend’s Orangemail backup.

The SOBig virus is primarily responsible for the other e-mail problems, including sending high volumes of e-mail through the system. Deborah Nosky, IT communications manager with CMS, also speculates that last night’s Orangemail malfunction, which lasted from about 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., can be attributed to a high volume of mail caused by the virus. The virus uses both an e-mail user’s address book and addresses found on HTML pages to spread and send more e-mails.

‘That’s why you might not recognize some of the names of the people that you get it from,’ Nosky said. Infected e-mails are relatively easy to recognize because of their 1 MB attachment and uniform subject lines such as ‘Thank You’, ‘Wicked Screensaver’ and ‘Details’.

While the SOBig virus doesn’t affect the estimated 10 percent of users with MacIntosh computers, Nosky strongly encourages students to download CMS’s recommended McAfee scan for the latest version of virus protection.

‘Every student needs to download the McAfee virus scan,’ Nosky said. ‘Students absolutely need to help in the resolution of this problem.’

CMS officials are asking all students who have even the slightest doubt about their susceptibility to the worm or virus to either go to the CMS Web site to fix the problem themselves or enlist the services of the newly-enlarged CMS staff.

In order to get the virus, a student must download the attachment sent to them. It is still unclear what specific damage the virus causes to personal computers.

Many students have already experienced the recent network problem firsthand.

‘[Monday], on my computer, every five seconds my Norton Antivirus would pop up, saying that I have a virus,’ said Alexis Colianni, a freshman speech communications major. She added that other students in her residence hall were experiencing e-mail problems.

The virus is not particular to the SU campus, but other universities are using different methods to combat it.

Most are logging off students completely and re-registering them back onto their network one by one, said Nosky, who hopes that CMS doesn’t have to resort to such a drastic measure.

‘That would be devastating to students,’ she said. ‘We want all this fixed as soon as possible.’

Published on September 2, 2003 at 12:00 pm