Virus renders school district's computers useless

School officials in Mounds View are battling a nasty bug, but the only thing the digital virus infects is computers.

"This particular virus goes in and attacks executables," said Mounds View school district's Nick Temali. "So when you turn a computer on, executables run everything."

In other words, when you hit a key on the keyboard, an executable tells the computer what to do with it. The virut-virus effectively shuts a computer down and renders it useless.

3,500 computers in the Mounds View school district were affected by the virus.

The district is now in the process of what's called re-imaging, which basically means reinstalling the operating system of every computer

"Wipe out the hard drive, install a new operating system, new anti-virus software, new everything that we had on there," said Temali.

According to Symantec, an anti-virus software company, the virus was discovered February 4th.

Since then it has shut down the court systems in Houston, Texas. Affected computers in Springfield City, Missouri and has made school life more complicated in Mounds View.

"It goes from teacher's taking attendance to putting students homework assignments online, to doing grades, to kids eating lunch," said Temali.

For now everything's being done the old fashioned way with pen and paper.

The virut is not an email virus and travels through the internet.

If a computer does not have the appropriate anti-virus software, it can become infected.

The district figures it likely passed into their network through a little flash drive.

It took just minutes for the virus to infect the computers. It will take another week to fix them. "Hopefully this never happens again," said Temali.

By Jeffrey DeMars, KARE 11 News

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