Skyline College was hit with the Blaster Virus on Aug. 11 2003. According to information provided by the Skyline IT Department, the virus slowly worked its way through district offices via e-mail, temporarily crippling computers throughout SMCCD. Computer labs, instructional computers, and administrative computers were all affected, but at varying degrees.
     In the CAOT (Computer Applications and Office of Technology) lab in building 8 the attack wasn’t observed until the afternoon of Aug. 28 when instructional aid Teresita Del Castillo-Brown conducted her afternoon walk-through before the shift change to the night shift.
     “We usually walk around the labs to see what’s going on,” said Castillo-Brown. “We noticed that in both labs there were at least ten computers that were shutting down-on and off by themselves.”
     Blaster and associated virus’s such as Sobig spread by flooding networks and inboxes with millions of Spam-spew messages. The computers shutting themselves on and off that Castillo-Brown noticed in the CAOT lab were typical of symptoms displayed by infected computers.
     Quick thinking on the part of staff probably saved all of the lab’s 74 computers from becoming infected. The staff was able to prevent the spread of the virus by disconnecting the computers in the lab from the network, in effect trapping the bugs in the black boxes.
     After that it was a matter of running the anti-virus software, finding and killing the virus/worms and bringing each of the computers back to normal operating standards.
     With teamwork between the day and evening staff, the Dean, and Skyline IT professionals, they were able to limit the infections, and bring the CAOT lab back to normal by first thing the next morning.
     The CAOT lab was not alone in their fight against the Blaster virus/worm. In a written statement given to The Skyline View by the college IT Department, nearly 2000 computers in administration and instruction were affected.
     “SMCCD IT support technicians worked long and hard for the best part of a week installing patches and updates to locate and clean virus-infected files” said Brad Witham, District ITS technician They used a tool from McAfee anti-virus called Stinger, which works to scan and clean hard, drives.
     The damage was limited in the computers at Skyline. Due to the quick thinking of the district, notifications were sent out throughout SMCCD. The subsequent action by Skyline staff combined with the current anti-virus tools, modern hardware and software enabled Skyline to minimize the affects of the attack.