Houston Municipal Courts Cancel Hearings Due to Computer Virus
A computer virus identified as a variant of Virut led to the cancellation of hearings in Houston municipal courts for an entire week.
The courts reopened on Friday, Feb. 13, after closing the previous Friday, the Houston Chronicle reports. The virus prevented employees from logging into the city computer network to access records, or it disconnected them from the system, the story says.
Thousands of cases were affected by the cancellations, the Houston Chronicle reported in an earlier story. The problem, which harmed 475 out of some 16,000 city computers, also led police to suspend minor arrests. Court offices remained open to accept payments of fines and tickets.
City officials first began seeing the effects of the virus on Wednesday, Feb. 4, and began battling it in full force the next day. Janis Benton, the city’s deputy director of information technology, initially said the virus could be a form of the Internet worm Conficker, as described here by USA Today. But other officials said they weren’t sure what was causing the problem.
Officials later said the virus was a Virut variant known as W32/Virut.n., the Houston Chronicle reported in a story on the problem. Antivirus software didn’t find the variant because it is so new.
SC Magazine calls the virus a “particularly nasty variant” that uses mutated code to escape detection.
Last updated on Feb. 17.
