Monday, July 26, 2004

Sasser Worm hits Rhodes

Yesterday evening Rhodes detected the first Sasser infection on its network, almost three months after the rest of the world has already dealt with this problem.

Sometime in May, when Sasser was first detected by the anti-virus vendors, we sent out e-mail to several mailing lists covering all staff and residence network users informing them of the problems Sasser could cause, and how to patch their machines against it. We didn't actually get infected with the rest of the world because the University's border firewalls and e-mail virus scanners, etc managed to prevent the infection from getting inside our network.

We all knew it was a matter of time however ...

Well the inevitable happened, in perhaps the most predictable way. Last night saw the return of all the students after their July vacation. As people moved back into the residences, they plugged their computers back in. It just took one fool (who happened to live in Cullen Bowles) to bring the infection from their home network and plugged it straight into Rhodes' network. Bloody Idiot!

Hmmm, it seems we have Korgo as well. *sigh*

posted by guy at: 15:01 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link