Update on Conficker C virus and April 1

UPDATE: Thanks to Lon Levy for this article: April Fool's Conficker Threat is Likely Hype. It's true, but just not as dire as reporters would like us to believe. Remember- panic sells papers. Or ads, or electrons, or whatever.

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I have received more questions today about the Conficker C virus thanks to a "60 Minutes" piece last night. Unfortunately, the report was more alarmist than informative.

Here are a couple facts:

• It affects only Windows computers.
  
• It probably won't activate on April 1, because everybody is expecting it.
  
• An infected computer is already receiving instructions from the P2P botnet, so it probably won't drastically change on April 1.
  
• There is now a way to detect infected computers. 

Read more at http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=3043&tag=nl.e539

The practical steps you can take:

1. If you must use Windows, make sure you have automatic updates turned on, and that they are installed. 
2. Use virus protection and make sure it's up-to-date.
3. Turn off your computer when you aren't using it. If it's not on, it can't be infected. Or infect others.  Plus, it will save electricity.

Virus and spyware threat: "Statement of fees"

Some users have received an email message with a zip file attached. The subject is "statement of fees." Please do not open the file or forward to us. Just DELETE immediately. Here's a screen shot of the mail received:

 

 

Some indications that this is an attack:

• the return address is from a foreign domain (bradteal.com.au)
• wording is pretty vague and generalized, but implies some time-sensitive pressure "this will be posted today"
• you have no idea who "Cherry Sylvester" is

PowerSchool back to normal

The PowerSchool server has returned to normal operations. PowerGrade users, please resume normal use.

Thank you to anybody running reports who stopped them. Please consider setting reports to be run during off hours such as evenings and weekends, when the server is not dealing with the regular workload of daily business.

PowerSchool support investigated, but could not find anything wrong with the server. They determined that it was just suffering from a huge number of requests at once. The busy handlers are back down to 1-3 now, so it should respond correctly to PowerGrade users. I asked about increasing the number of handlers, but they said doing so would reduce performance of the web server, which most people use to access the server.

Thanks for your patience.

PowerSchool overloaded

The PowerSchool server is way overloaded right now, causing PowerGrade users to get a "cannot connect to server" message. PowerGrade is designed to save your grades and send them up to the server the next time it can connect, but the best advice I can give right now would be to wait. If you are running any reports that can wait until later, please wait.

More info: The server has all 80 "handlers" being used. (On a regular day, it's about 4-6.) We are trying to increase the resources allocated to jobs, but there is a tradeoff between general system performance.