A new worm virus is affecting computers worldwide, but MSU's new webmail system's antivirus software will catch the worm before it affects the student computers and the university system.
The virus dubbed MyDoom, Novarg and Mimail.Rand is clogging corporate and university e-mail servers. MSU is no exception.
Richard Wiggins, the Computer Center's senior information technologist, said the mail system blocked hundreds of thousands of worms Tuesday, and he anticipated a million blocks by the day's end. Wiggins said some mail users might notice a lag in the system with the increased traffic.
"The timing is interesting, because we happened to put in the antivirus Dec. 17," he said. "If we hadn't had the feature, it would have been really bad."
The worm, which affects Windows systems, began spreading late Sunday.
It uses a backdoor system, which can allow the attacker to connect to the computer.
"Some may be infected and they don't know it," Wiggins said.
The virus grabs e-mail addresses and spreads them to other computers, like previous worm viruses. But what makes this worm different is it randomly changes e-mail subject lines and sender information. Another unique aspect to the new worm is that it is scheduled to launch an attack on SCO Group in early February.
This virus has a date to stop spreading Feb. 12.
MSU's old Pilot e-mail system does not protect against this virus, Wiggins said.
Pilot user Melissa Smith was one student who received a returned-to-sender message in her inbox because the virus had attempted to attack her computer.
"The thing was, I didn't know who the person was who sent the e-mail back, and I hadn't sent them an e-mail," the east Asian languages and cultures junior said. "I didn't know what to think about it, but I didn't know there was this virus going around, so I wasn't concerned at the time. Now, I may be."
Family community services senior Jessica Martin switched to the webmail system Monday to help control the amount of spam e-mails she received each week.
"I'm not really concerned about it," Martin said of the virus. "I've already gotten a couple viruses on my computer, so I use the computer lab."
The University of Michigan had reason to be concerned Monday evening when the virus first popped up on its system, but the problem was quickly controlled, said Liz Sweet, U-M director of the user advocate office of U-M Information Technology Central Services.
Sweet said the university also recently upgraded its mail system late last fall to increase e-mail message filtering.
"What that allows us to do is we can give the server a profile of what the virus looks like, and it checks all the incoming e-mail and throws away anything that meets that profile," she said, adding U-M was susceptible to the virus for a couple hours before the virus profile was loaded into the system.
To keep updated on the worm's effect on the MSU computer system, visit help.msu.edu/status.
Staff writers Tina Reed and Jackie Roeschke contributed to this report.
