Macintoshes Infected : Computer Virus Plagues CSUN

Cal State Northridge officials said Monday that they are issuing warnings to students about a rapidly spreading computer virus that threatens to infect hundreds of Macintosh computers on the San Fernando Valley campus.

At least a dozen of the school’s Macintosh computers have been infected with the virus, known as nVIR, school officials said. The virus--a computer program that is spread from machine to machine by a common computer disk--disrupts functions such as word processing and printing, officials said.

The nVIR bug is different from more damaging computer viruses because it does not erase information stored on computer disks, university computer consultants said. The worst effect of the virus is that individual computers are stalled until the virus is removed. But removal of the virus from campus systems has required hours of reprogramming, school officials said.

“In general, this thing is spreading like mad,” said Chris Sales, the university’s computer center consultant. “It originated in West Germany, found its way to UCLA and in a short time infected us here.”

The virus, discovered on the Northridge campus last week, was spread to Macintosh computers in the student bookstore, as well as the Macintosh systems used by the student government and student activities offices, Sales said. Students have inadvertently spread the virus by swapping programs on infected disks or by using infected machines, he said.

Greg Lovell, the campus bookstore’s computer consultant, fears that students and faculty may be holding scores of infected disks that will spread the virus to many of the school’s nearly 1,000 Macintosh computers.

“I take my infected disk, use it in your machine, now you’ve got it,” Lovell said. “You take a disk over to your office and you’ve infected the whole Mac system there. . . . You spread it, and you don’t even know it.”

Computer consultants at the school are only half-jokingly calling for students to engage in “safe computing” to combat the virus. The bookstore is testing students’ computer disks for signs of the virus before they are allowed to rent a Macintosh computer there, Lovell said.

Students are being warned to use programs that test for the virus, known as “vaccines,” on their computer disks. Macintosh users can also employ “prophylactic” protection against the virus by altering disks in a way that prevents data from passing between computer and computer disk, Sales said.