Virus Infects SAU 57 System, Could Delay Grades

Salem School District staff are currently working to identify, target and clean up individual school computer servers after they were infected with a virus late last week.

According to Superintendent Michael Delahanty, he has no reason to believe that the virus was targeted at the district.

"This is not a common virus, it's more of a contemporary virus, but nevertheless it's not a virus that selects organizations to infect," said Delahanty.

The virus is specifically impacting the SAU 57 office, Salem High School and Woodbury School. Delahanty said that he doesn't believe that elementary school files have been infected.

Grades at SHS closed on Tuesday, and they are supposed to go out to students on either April 15 or April 16.

"We are hopeful that we can still meet that goal," said Delahanty.

The district's financial, personnel and student information packages are all safe, said Delahanty.

Much of the operations are able to continue, and the primary issue is the inability to retrieve files on a shared server. The district website is also down. Delahanty said that Internet access in the school district has been "intermittent," but hasn't been steadily down.

Delahanty said that when the district was infected between Thursday evening and Friday morning, a fix was attempted over the weekend and staff believed that everything was back to normal.

"Mid-Monday morning, it was clear that the problem still existed," he said.

According to Delahanty, the virus itself was residing perhaps on someone's workstation in an isolated area of one of the SAU 57 servers when it was sparked back to life, infiltrating the servers once again.

Delahanty said that he has been told that the virus does not infect individual workstations or personal computers, but rather it looks for larger operations with multiple servers, a profile that SAU 57 fits.

While there is no specific timeframe for the problem to be fixed, Delahanty said that the district's network administrator, systems administrator and IT coordinator have all been tasked with fixing the problem.

"They installed an antivirus program that is currently identifying, targeting invidual servers, cleaning up any infections," said Delahanty. "Because we have about 80 to 85 servers including several virtual servers, it's going to take a while for this to be cleaned up. But I don't anticipate that it's going to be more than the end of this week."