UCit Urges User Vigilance And Common Sense On Viruses

As you are aware by now, there has been another outbreak of computer infections, this time the Sasser worm. This follows on the heels of the Bagle (sic) virus.

The good news is that UC has not been seriously impacted by these threats, certainly not to the extent of Delta Airlines and other corporate systems as reported in the news. However, UCit has discovered over 340 infected machines. They were subsequently disconnected from the network, but not before they sent infected mail out to others. This wastes a variety of institutional resources including the time of individual users to clean their machines, UCit staff to identify, disconnect and clean machines, and the time of those who receive scrubbed messages to delete them. This results in a significant productivity loss for the university.

All of this wasted effort can be prevented. Two truisms of virus-free life on the Internet are taking hold.

One is never open an attachment that looks suspicious or is from a suspicious source. The second, operative here, is that individual users must keep their machines up-to-date with the latest software updates (often a euphemism for security patches). The patch that prevented the Sasser worm from exploiting a Microsoft vulnerability was available four weeks ago. Users automatically informed of the availability of updates who install the appropriate patches save themselves and others a lot of wasted time.

We ask you to do this as responsible community members. In addition, UCit provides many other effective computer safeguards at no charge to members of the UC community. Through a site license agreement with Network Associates, users may download the latest versions of the McAfee industry-leading virus protection software from http://www.ucit.uc.edu/computers/software/#mcafee. Users may run a software cleaning product from http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/.