Checking email last Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday proved to be difficult for many Amherst students and faculty members thanks to the Nimda virus, which sped through the network and created a host of computer problems. Because of the high network traffic caused by Nimda, the NT mail system and some software servers like Winsoft and Macsoft were infected and took longer than expected to repair.

Nimda is a new virus whose versatility and speed make it difficult to catch before any damage has been done. "It has several methods it exploits to infect your PC. You can 'catch' the virus via an email attachment or by visiting a website that had been infected with Nimda or even accessing a network server that had been infected," said Microcomputer Specialist Maura Fennelly. Unfortunately, once a specific computer is infected, the virus doesn't rest but rather seeks out other computers to infect, either by emailing itself to people in an address book and to email addresses from web pages that were recently visited, or by searching the network for computers with certain kinds of vulnerabilities. Nimda therefore thrives on networks such as Amherst's because of the network's large size and high volume of internal usage.

By the end of the week, things were pretty much back to normal for the College computer system, but not before some members of the community were questioning what could be done to prevent such an interruption in the future.

"The most frustrating thing is that I run Norton Anti-Virus every time my computer starts up and I have also installed the Virus Shield program that the school has available on the network," Polly Hall '04 said. "With the delay that these programs cause my system in startup time, you'd think they would work and protect you."

Fennelly explained that the high-speed nature of Nimda is what created a problem.

"We have anti-virus software running on the servers, including the NT mail system," Fennelly said. "The NT mail system also scans incoming email attachments for viruses. However, the anti-virus software can only catch viruses it already knows about. Usually there is enough time for the anti-virus software companies to distribute the updated DAT files [the virus definitions] before the new virus becomes widespread. However, Nimda moved very, very quickly."

Several preventative steps are available to protect against further problems, according to Fennelly. Students should make sure that they have anti-virus software on their computers and that they keep it up-to-date. Many students do not realize that their anti-virus software needs to be updated in order for it to be effective. Also, students should make sure that the anti-virus software on their computers is set up to scan all of the files that are downloaded, according to Fennelly.