Chernobyl computer virus has little impact on UB
Some students' PCs hit; sharing of digital-music files a major factor

By ELLEN GOLDBAUM
News Services Editor

The university has pretty much "dodged the bullet," experiencing little impact so far from the insidious Chernobyl or CIH computer virus, according to Rick Lesniak, director of academic services in Computing and Information Technology.

In particular, none of the public labs open to all members of the university community have experienced any problems.

"All of our public labs were immune to this virus because they run Windows NT, " Lesniak explained. Designed for corporations and large institutions, NT is a more robust, more secure system than Windows 95 and 98, programs that were hardest hit by Chernobyl.

But some students weren't so lucky. Of 71 calls relating to the virus that were tracked by the CIT help desk, most of the reports of the virus were on students' personal machines.

Created by a Taiwanese engineer-who confessed to the deed last week-the virus wipes out most of the data on a computer's hard drive, sometimes rendering these machines useless.

"This is one of the worst viruses, in terms of how malevolent it is," said Lesniak. "It not only wipes out hard drives, but corrupts BIOS, the most basic program that exists on computers."

UB Micro has repaired about 15 computers that were hit by the virus, with only about a quarter of them having had the BIOS (basic input output system) affected. UB Micro staff said it is certain that more machines were hit, but that in many cases, students were able to help each other reinstall operating systems and software.

The virus most likely spread quickly through the residence halls due to the widespread sharing of files among students, said Brian Costello, lead computer technician at UB Micro.

"That's why it was a problem here," said Costello. "The students are passing their programs back and forth."

In particular, CIT and UB Micro staff pointed to the MP3 format, a wildly popular format for sharing digital music over the Internet.

According to Costello, some students whose computers had been hit by Chernobyl had as many as 800 songs stored on their hard drives.

If the virus infects all of the programs on a computer, and one of those programs is passed on to another computer, it then infects all of those files, too.

Outages also were experienced in the walkway node, which serves the Graduate School of Education, the School of Law, the School of Library and Information Studies, and the School of Social Work.

According to Sarbani Banerjee, director of the walkway technology node, nine PCs were affected in the lab in 200C Baldy Hall, while four were affected in the lab at 403-405 O'Brian Hall. All of these machines had their BIOS affected.

Repairs were made to the machines in between classes, which are held in these labs; all had been repaired within a day of reports of problems. Two machines belonging to faculty members also were affected.

Still, in terms of how other institutions around the U.S. were affected, UB appears to have fared much better than some other universities. According to a story in The Washington Post last week, 500 students at Virginia Tech reported their computers had been infected, while about 100 students each at Princeton University and Boston College reported their machines had been hit.

What can people do to protect their files from future viruses?

"The most important action you could take is to keep virus files updated," said Costello. "The other thing we recommend is to run the virus-detection program right off of a floppy that you know is clean."

"We haven't heard the end of this," warned Ray Volpe, director of UB Micro. "There are 'repeat performances' expected.