Virus!! Run away!

Last Wednesday evening, Missouri State’s College of Natural and Applied Sciences (CNAS) got blessed with a lovely virus. A laptop initiated it somehow (I don’t know all the details) and things went downhill. The virus exploits computers that have an outdated version of Symantec Anti Virus, downloads 100 files all over the computer and then wreaks havoc. Done with the computers, the virus then spread to the servers which went kaput instantly. Thursday morning, a CNAS-wide email was sent telling people to update their Symantec. Those of us that are mere peons and lack Administrative privileges can’t install updates (or anything else for that matter) and when damage control kicked in Thursday afternoon, every computer that didn’t get updated in the morning got their port shutdown. All of my work is done off of one of those servers and one week later my port is still firewalled.

The best part about this whole ordeal is that the one person in charge of software for CNAS was on vacation the whole week prior. Her sole purpose in life is to prevent this kind of thing from happening and well, she dropped the ball. She is in charge of something like 400 computers, including 2 Geography labs (which had classes cancelled Thursday and Friday) and unfortunately she won’t get fired because the powers at be weren’t inconvenienced at all.

Do your job, software lady.