To ALL students:

Over the past summer, a few rather dangerous viruses began propagating across the Internet. One of the most common was Blaster.

In case you missed it on the news, Blaster is a worm virus that is designed to infect PCs running Windows 2000 or Windows XP (Home or Professional). It takes advantage of a flaw in the coding of Windows and uses that flaw to replicate itself on the PC. What makes Blaster extremely dangerous is its ability to spread. Unlike most viruses that need a web page, email, or document to spread, Blaster can to this via any open network connection and look for other machines with this flaw. This ability has allowed Blaster to take down whole networks; even some Internet Providers were disabled due to extreme amounts of Blaster traffic.

The main protection against the Blaster virus is to install a small patch from Microsoft that corrects the flaw in Windows 2000 and XP. This patch was released in mid-July, almost a month before the virus went live. All of the public machines at Dominican have had this patch installed since then. However, most home users are not as thorough as an IT department can be and fall behind with updates (or don’t do them at all). Therefore, we are making available both the cleaning utility for removal of Blaster and the patch to correct this issue.

One of the main symptoms of Blaster is erratic rebooting of the PC. If this has been happening to you, then your PC is most likely infected. The cleaning of your computer with these files is required for all people wanting to connect to the Dominican University network.  In addition, we highly recommend all users with Windows 2000 or Windows XP on their machines install the appropriate patch for their version of Windows on their home computers. Each of these files is less than one floppy disc big (the largest of the three being about 1.2 Megabytes). Note – Versions of Windows before 2000 (Windows 95, 98, ME) are NOT affected by Blaster.

Cleaning your machine – do this even if you are unsure if you have the virus or not.  Click on the ‘blaster’ link below and select ‘run’ when asked if you want to run the program or save it.  The software will execute by itself.

Blaster Cleaner

Preventing reinfection – choose the file appropriate to your operating system, click on the link and select ‘run’ when asked if you want to run the program or save it.

Windows 2000 Patch

Windows XP Patch (Home & Professional)

There are many, simple ways to protect yourself from future viruses like Blaster that will, no doubt, appear in the future:

1. Keep Windows up to date using Windows Update. To run Windows Update, open Internet Explorer and go to Tools -> Windows Update. This is especially important with Windows 2000 and XP as they are newer and security flaws are still being found in them. A good rule of thumb is to install all the items in the “Critical Updates” sections and to run Windows Update minimally a few times a month.
2. Purchase and install a virus scanner (if you don’t have one already) and keep it UP TO DATE. 99% of viruses can be stopped before they even hit you by a good virus scanner. It is smart to update it at least once a week.

These simple steps can make your PC more reliable and protect you against just about anything the Internet can throw at you.