Code Red virus strikes school district...

Code Red virus strikes school district Web site

Night owls who tried to log on to the Newport-Mesa Unified School

District’s Web site early Wednesday were stymied by a faux hack job

that turned out to be a computer virus, officials said.

While the Web site displayed a message that said, “This page was

hacked by the Chinese,” the breakdown was definitely the result of an

Internet virus called Code Red, said Alan Engard, the district’s

director of information technology, who discovered the problem about

8 a.m. Wednesday. The virus probably infiltrated the system sometime

after midnight, Engard said.

The Web site was susceptible to viruses because some software had

recently been changed on the Web server, which “opened up a security

hole,” Engard said.

The hole was easy to fix, Engard said, and in about half an hour

the site was up and running again.

Engard had bought some additional security hardware to protect the

computer that he was planning to install next week but decided to do

it Wednesday evening instead to prevent another virus.

-- Deirdre Newman