It’s a tough job market out there for computer viruses. I mean, you have to be sympathetic to those little fellas who can’t even work out in the open. As soon as they’re discovered, they’re fired. And it’s happened again – after over a decade on the job, computer viruses at City College of San Francisco were recently discovered and given their pink slips.
A computer security team, led by David Hotchkiss, found the viruses just after Thanksgiving, while doing routine maintenance.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
Each night at about 10 p.m., at least seven viruses begin trolling the college networks and transmitting data to sites in Russia, China and at least eight other countries, including Iran and the United States, Hotchkiss and his team discovered. Servers and desktops have been infected across the college district’s administrative, instructional and wireless networks. It’s likely that personal computers belonging to anyone who used a flash drive during the past decade to carry information home were also affected.
Data shows that the computers have been infected since, at least, 1999. City College isn’t the size of your average community college. In fact, it’s probably bigger than your average four-year college. According to Wikipedia, “With an enrollment in excess of 100,000 students, City College of San Francisco is the largest community and junior college in the United States, and the second-largest collegiate institution overall.”
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