Virus Eats School District's Homework 321
theodp writes "Forget about 'snow days' — the kids in the Lake Washington School District could probably use a few 'virus days.' Laptops issued to each student in grades 6-12 were supposed to accelerate learning ('Schools that piloted the laptops found that students stayed engaged nad [sic] organized whiel [sic] boosting creativity,' according to the district's Success Stories), but GeekWire reports that a computer virus caused havoc for the district as it worked its way through the Windows 7 computers, disrupting class and costing the district money — five temporary IT staff members were hired to help contain the virus. Among the reasons cited for the school district's choice of PCs over Macs were the proximity to Microsoft HQ (Redmond is in the district), Microsoft's involvement in supporting local and national education, and last but not least, cost. In the past, the Lake Washington School District served as a Poster Child of sorts for Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group."
Is it 10 years already? (Score:4, Interesting)
There once was this thing, the "trustworty computing" pledge. [theregister.co.uk]
What happened to that?
And Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
Among the reasons cited for the school district's choice of PCs over Mac's were (...) cost.
And yet Linux was never an option? Avoided Apple to reduce the cost and ended up hiring 5 people to contain the damage that came as a consequence of their choice... way to go!
Need to teach the kids proper browsing habits (Score:4, Interesting)
Viruses are easy to take out of the system, but that doesn't stop the same behavior that puts the virus there in the first place.
Example: A friend of mine I end up fixing his laptop for viruses usually gets them because his kids are looking for TV shows and gets sent to sites that want them to download something. Boom, infected. Looking for a youtube/Disney/Hulu video downloading, boom! Infected.
I don't care too much because I get paid. And getting rid of the viruses/whatever is as easy as taking the harddrive out of the computer and hooking it to an already running computer (via usb-ide/sata adaptor), and run a few programs. Takes a few hours, or more depending on the size of the harddrive and how much space is taken up. But very, very easy to fix.
Re:Looks like the school district (Score:3, Interesting)
... all the while trying to save "cost" :-)
I'm not sure how it would have cost them any less if they'd have gone with an Apple-branded OS. Or even Linux for that matter.
Despite what the summary and school says, technically this was a Trojan which drops a backdoor into the system. It's been detectable by all the major AV software vendors for a very long time, the earliest variants were from back in the old DOS days.
Since the school can't even manage to spell properly, I'm going to assume that what happened was something like this:
Child A: "I heard this is cool, let's open it up!"
Child B: "But it keep says there's a warning. I can't get it to install."
Child C: "I already have it. I have a friend on Facebook called p3d0b3ar who sent it to me last week. Here's how to make the warning go away."
Child A & B: "Cool! Let's help all our friends install it too!"
Re:Looks like the school district (Score:3, Interesting)
"Here's how to make the warning go away."
If only it were that difficult.
I got a virus last week because I was trying to install MS antivirus on a machine. Microsoft Security Essentials requires a WGA check and it failed for some reason (don't know why - it was a perfectly legal machine).
Anyway, I went to Google to see if I could find a workaround and ... the very first page I visited installed a virus on the machine. No warnings, no permissions asked for. Some system dialog or other flashed up then ten seconds later I was looking at one of those "Police! Your computer has been locked!" screens (and the prospect of another Late Night With Windows(TM)).
Catching a virus by trying to install an anti-virus? Only with "Trustworthy Computing"....
Re:How about they.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah... I didn't think so. After four years, I make around 60% of what I would in the private sector starting wage for the same job. Guess what, though! Jobs are scarce, so I can't afford to be picky. Yes, I'm good at what I do (and I've done great things for this school), but by no means is the public sector all green fields and pork barrel funding. We're more cash-strapped than you can imagine (I'm having to buy cheaper asset labels, for pity's sake).
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