When computer systems crash, it’s the same story at most companies: Employees clean their desks, get pen and paper, gather around the water cooler, roll suitcases of work home.
But when a computer system crashes at a school district, classrooms, teacher collaboration and more are affected as well.
A computer virus recently took out the Edmonds School District’s network, affecting the district offices and some schools.
When the virus hit, district employees saw how much they rely on their computers to work, said Cynthia Nelson, district technology director.
“Several of our teachers in the affected schools were saying: ‘But how do I teach?’” Nelson said. “It’s become such an integral part of how we do business that it’s very painful when you don’t have access to that tool.”
The wireless network covers all district schools.
Most schools were not affected by the virus, said Nelson, who had to interrupt some staff development activities to keep the virus from spreading.
“You have a room full of teachers (and) laptops from different schools collaborating together on a project,” she said. “We would not have been able to do that without the laptops and the wireless network.”
At the district central office, people did what limited work they could.
“A lot of people just did things with paper and pencil, cleaned out their drawers, kind of limped along and we knew at the end of the first day that would not be an acceptable thing to ask people to do for the next day,” Nelson said.
Fortunately, some laptops that were getting ready to be deployed to classrooms were virus-free and usable.
“It kept our human resources department running,” Nelson said.
The trouble began late the week of April 30, when some district computers were hit by a variant of the known viking.ix virus, called viking.jv.
It’s a worm virus that attacks programs on computers and shuts them down so they can’t be used, Nelson said. It spreads rapidly through a computer’s network.
On May 7 and May 8, the virus spread significantly.
“We realized it wasn’t traveling through e-mail and that it probably was traveling through people taking laptops from one location to another,” Nelson said.
So the district put up a sign on its central office doors saying a quarantine was in effect and asking visitors not to use their laptops at the office.
There’s no standard way a virus like that behaves, Nelson said: You have to figure it out.
“As the week progressed, we learned every day how it was behaving, how it was transmitting, who it was working,” Nelson said. Thien-An Hua, LANDesk administrator for the district, was the most involved in solving the puzzle and finding fixes, she said.
Nelson sent out containment measures to keep the virus from spreading, and by Friday, May 11, had found a fix for the virus. They distributed it to more than 8,000 computers across the district network, which meant computer technicians didn’t have to be sent to install the fix.
On Wednesday morning, May 16 — the Enterprise deadline — the problem had been mostly contained, but the district was still working on it.
Nelson said she didn’t know if the district was specifically targeted.
The district has anti-virus software, but this virus is so new the software didn’t know about it, Nelson said.
“I wish that people would channel their energies in constructive ways, instead of this,” she said of those who write viruses. “But the reality is they don’t and we just have to make sure we can put in place tools that helps us recover.”
She said she felt good that the district was able to respond so quickly.
“It could have been really bad,” Nelson said.
Edmonds Community College, which is across the parking lot from the district administration building, suffered no effects from the virus, officials there said.
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