Local News in Brief : Reports of Virus’s Death Are Premature

In Thursday’s Daily Sundial, the Cal State Northridge newspaper, a campus official declared victory over a nasty computer virus afflicting some of the school’s computers.

But the virus wasn’t dead. It struck again Thursday in the university’s journalism department.

An 8 a.m. class had to be canceled when new Macintosh computers in the department’s editing and graphics lab went haywire, said Prof. Michael Emery, chairman of the journalism department.

Emery said a technician spent much of the day decontaminating the lab’s 10 computers, which involved copying students’ work onto floppy discs and then wiping out the software and instructions that tell the computers what to do. Emery said the system was to be up and running by late Thursday or Friday morning.

The virus did not affect computers used by the Daily Sundial, KCSN radio news or CSUN’s Scene Magazine, officials said.

Said Emery: “The teaching side got obliterated, but the production side escaped.”

Emery said that lab computers apparently were contaminated when a student or instructor brought in a disc that had been exposed to infected programs elsewhere on the campus.

“It’s like a cold,” he said. “I mean, that’s why we call it a virus. It spreads.”

From now on, Emery said, any disc brought into the lab will have to be screened by a technician. He said steps also will be taken to protect computers used by the campus news organizations.