Many of you have noticed the recent problems accessing network drives and computers booting up exceedingly slow – the problems started on Friday and have been on and off throughout the weekend and into this morning.

We wanted to let you know that these issues were caused by a few computers on campus (2 macs and 1 pc) which were infected with multiple pieces of malware (an all-inclusive term for viruses, worms, spyware, etc.) and used to send “denial of service” attacks at our servers (namely, fileserver1) from within our network. Our new network design prevented this from becoming a full network outage, but fileserver1 has been unavailable for parts of the past 3 days, causing people to lose access to some network drives (H:, I:, personalwebs, etc.) and PCs with automatic connections to one of these drives to boot very slowly.

The problems are solved for the moment, and we are cleaning the malware off those 3 computers – if you find that you do not have a network drive available that you expect to be there, you can log off and back on (or simply reboot) your computer and the drives will show up.

We encourage all of you to educate yourself about how to protect your computers from these types of threats – we do what we can centrally, but the most important methods of preventing malware infection and identity theft are up to each of you individually. We have an extensive guide which is a good place to start hosted on our Help Desk website here: http://helpdesk.coloradocollege.edu/index.php/tips-and-how-to/protect-your-computer/ and are happy to answer any questions you might have.