Thursday, Sept. 11, 2003 | 11:14 a.m.
Computer worms and viruses partially crippled what may be the most-visited Internet address in Nevada -- Clark County's official website -- for much of Wednesday.
Visitors to the site at accessclarkcounty.com met with either partial or total frustration. Clark County spokesman Erik Pappa said the site, which, with 8.8 million visitors in July, probably was the most visited site in the state. The site has been hit hard by waves of several such self-replicating computer bugs over the last several weeks.
Viruses and worms disrupt computer systems and websites by infecting a computer and sending the infection over e-mail links to addresses on the computer's hard drive. The problem usually is not in the virus or worm itself, but the volume of messages the computer and other infected computers send out can overwhelm networks.
Part of the problem at Clark County is that the county is closely connected with other agencies, some of which have been sources for the bugs, Pappa said. The problem Wednesday appeared to originate with computers at Metro Police. A similar problem with the city of North Las Vegas was corrected last week.
Metro's David Garcia, automation policies and planning director, said the problem was identified by his counterparts at the Clark County Government Center and his agency worked quickly to correct the problem.
"This does not affect Metro's ability to serve the public and to ensure the public is safe," he said. "We had about 10 computers that were actually hit by the viruses. That's out of about 2,000 machines.
"We did respond as quickly as we heard from the county that they had identified suspicious activity."
While the county's computer system was overwhelmed, Metro's computer services were apparently unaffected by the virus, he said. The public's access to Metro's website and internal computer uses were not affected, he added.
"All of our services were still up," he said.
Garcia said anti-virus software is installed on all of his agencies computers, but that software, as people have learned, is only as good as the last virus to circulate through the Internet. A new virus could lead to similar problems.
"We believe we have it under control," he said. "The unfortunate thing about viruses is that fixing the problem is reactionary right now."
County officials say they have high-speed, high-volume connections to many other agencies.
"We're all vulnerable," Pappa said. "We're not casting blame anywhere. The bigger you are the more vulnerable you are.
"We're the biggest."
Rosalina Rios, director of the Clark County Center for Enterprise Information Technology, the department running the county's computer systems, agreed.
"We are having some problems," Rios said.
She said the problem was affecting both the county's internal and external computer services, including many of the county's 5,500 computers. She said the county has taken aggressive steps to contain the problem, including severing networks with other agencies -- including Metro -- that appear to be the sources of the electronic deluge.
"The effect on us has been moderate," Rios said. "It hasn't completely shut down operations."
Late Wednesday afternoon the county's website appeared to be completely unavailable. By 6 p.m., however, the website seemed to be readily accessible.
Rios said the problem was caused by the Welchia worm, a bug that first caused headaches around Las Vegas and the world last week.
Computer experts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas said the bugs have afflicted a number of agencies, including the university, in the past several weeks. Lori Temple, UNLV associate provost for information technology, said a big public agency such as Clark County can be especially vulnerable to such a "denial of service" attack.
"It only takes two or three computers to bring a system down," Temple said.
Even a handful of infected machines can dump huge volumes of traffic into a system, overwhelming it, she said. Clark County already handles huge volumes of computer traffic, she added.
While Clark County officials say the fixes have been applied to their computers, users outside the system are not likely as diligent, Temple said.
"Think of all the people who have computers, who have Clark County e-mail addresses, who haven't patched their machines yet," she said. "It wouldn't take but a few Welchias, a few infected machines, to put Clark County over the top."
Brian Rudolph, UNLV systems and applications director, said the recent bugs do not appear to significantly damage individual computers or systems. The problem is all about traffic.
"Very often the website itself is not down, but there is so much traffic running around that you can't get to it," he said.
The latest bugs only emphasize the need to apply the patches distributed by anti-virus software and the software producer, in this case Microsoft, he said.
"You need to have your virus definitions up to date and you need to make sure you have all the latest patches and updates to the operating system," Rudolph said.
But even if everybody is diligent about applying those fixes, these computer bugs will still make problems, he warned.
"The big question is: Is this ever going to stop?" he said. "As long as human beings are writing software, there will always be vulnerabilities in that software."
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