Projo 7 to 7 News Blog

EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Technicians have been battling an "insidious virus" that has infected, and reinfected, all of the computers within the city's school district.

The Chariho School District also had the Qbot virus last week, but its internal tech team had fixed the problem by Monday.

The virus steals information users type while they are on the Internet by memorizing or copying each key stroke and sends it to awaiting accomplices.

In East Providence, teachers, school administrators, support staff and students have been told not to turn on any computers. The school district's Web site has been down since the virus arrived.

East Providence began a cleanup to its 1,100 computers, but a variation of the virus was introduced to a computer Monday and it "spread quickly" to several others, said Bob Brigham, a manager of Tech Team Goverment Solutions Inc., a company in Portsmouth that East Providence hired to help them. District officials are in the process of creating its own internal technology department, but have only hired a director thus far.

It is unknown who or what brought the virus to the district -- or Chariho's district for that matter -- but all say it had to be introduced by visiting an infected Internet site, checking a poisoned email or uploading a bad file from a removable drive or memory stick.

Yet a spokesman at Rhode Island Network for Educational Technology, the nonprofit collaborative that provides the Internet and other services to all the state's schools and libraries, said there isn't any evidence indicating this virus has spread to other communities.

"This is a bad virus," Brigham said, "an insidious virus. To fix it, it has to be done in a very systematic way."

The hired team re-cleaned the servers running the computers at the high school and school administration building. They also uploaded a specific program that would block Qbot from introducing itself again.

They plan to do the same to the servers and computers in the city's middle and elementary schools with the hopes that everything will be back up and running by the start of next week.

It repair may cost the district as much as $25,000, said Lonnie Barham, the district's chief operating officer. He said it is money the district -- which is currently running a deficit and has unpaid bills from the last school year -- doesn't have.

"Ridiculous" was the way Barham characterized the difficulty of doing without computers for more than a week.

Some soon-to-be graduates need them to present their senior projects. Judging began this week. In addition, it is mandatory that middle and high school students are proficient in computer basics. Computer classes couldn't use their machines this and last week.

Then, there's the day-to-day operation (checking emails, printing lesson plans, etc.) of the district that relies heavily on computers. Luckily, Barham said Qbot did not get into any of the district's data systems where personal information is stored.

"We have some computers that are so old that they won't even take [the anti-virus program that needs to be uploaded]," Barham also said. "We have to keep those -- up to 200 computers -- offline for good."

Said Brigham, "I don't think we realize how important technology is until it's not there anymore."

 Tags  East Providence RI

Comments

Klark said:

I wonder if the school officials STILL think Macs are more expensive.

Link | May 15, 2009 3:30 PM
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Elizabeth said:

Memo to school purchasing offices: Once you go Mac, you'll never go back. Or: Don't be penny-wise and pound-foolish when you buy crucial equipment for educating children.

Link | May 15, 2009 3:50 PM
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Robert said:

This is exactly why they should use something like Ubuntu. It costs them nothing to install and use, no new hardware, and it will save them money, in cases like this $25,000! But they are stuck on MS when they have no real reasons to use Windows over Ubuntu/Linux.

Link | May 15, 2009 4:25 PM
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CO said:

This is why they need to use firewalls....

Link | September 16, 2009 2:07 AM
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