Iowa’s not immune from a rash of computer viruses that caused minor irritations and major crashes around the world this week. At Southwestern Community College in Creston, spokeswoman Terri Higgins says they found the problem Monday.As the problem increased, they discovered it was two main viruses, nicknamed “Blast” and “SoBig.” Higgins says the virus probably arrived on campus via an infected e-mail.She says with the school’s firewall, it couldn’t have simply come through the internet, but virus protection programs weren’t working when it hit, so now workers are “cleaning” each computer manually and taking them off the campus network until each is ready to reconnect. Higgins says there are about 500 computers on the network at the Southwestern Community College campus. Satellite centers at Red Oak and Osceola were also affected, but will likely be back on-line by early next week. Higgins says thanks to fast work by the school’s computer department, students shouldn’t be too badly inconvenienced by the latest computer worm going around. Classes begin at Southwestern next Wednesday. The campus helpdesk at University of Iowa confirms the “SoBig” virus turned up in computers at the “U,” and Iowa State put a block on some outgoing email to stop the worm’s tactic of replicating itself by sending a blizzard of infected mail.
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