• 
• CLASS
• JOBS
• AUTO
• HOMES

District working to fix damage of computer virus

JANESVILLE — Janesville School District computer technicians are working overtime to reload servers plagued by a virus, Director of Business Services Doug Bunton said.

“It is a serious problem for us—significant problem—that has taken a tremendous amount of time to undo the damage that was done,” he said.

The virus affected software on a majority of the district’s 60 servers, disabling Internet access, e-mail, the Skyward electronic grade book system and Microsoft Office, Bunton said.

A newer version of an old virus was detected in the system Sept. 19, he said. The district’s anti-virus software detected and attacked the virus, but not in time to prevent damage.

“How it got in the first place is the big question,” he said.

So far, it seems no data has been lost.

“As near as we can tell, everything is still there,” Bunton said. “We just need to get the programs in place.”

Techs on Friday were continuing to reload and re-set the servers the bug got into.

“That’s a pretty time consuming process,” he said.

Not all schools are experiencing the same problems and not all at the same level, he said.

The district is hoping to have the Microsoft suite products and Skyward electronic grade book system running in all buildings by early next week, he said. Those systems are important in part because midterm grades and parent-teacher conferences are coming up soon.

Work could take three to four weeks to get the servers back to 100 percent, Bunton said.

The tech staff is working 12 to 15 hour days and weekends to get the district system back on track, he said. Outside consultants are assisting, he said.

The district’s Web site also has been down, but Bunton wasn’t sure why. He said that hasn’t been a top priority.

The district experienced problems in January when a malicious piece of programming infected the network, causing computers to act up but no great loss of data. The infection was known as a “data pocket,” which was not a virus but did cause individual computers across the district to lock up, shut down, restart or give false error messages.

Bunton said the district has firewalls and anti-virus software, but no computer-security system is perfect.

He said the district’s systems capture and stop viruses all the time before they can do any damage.