Sobig virus affects B.T.L. server
Those of you who depend on email for business, or to stay in touch with friends and family, probably noticed that over the past several days your messages were slow in arriving at their destinations…in some cases, they didn’t go through at all. While the problem is exclusively with B.T.L. email addresses, for once the blame does not lie with Belize Telecommunications Limited. According to Public Relations Manager, Suzette Tillett, a fast spreading “worm” unleashed on the internet last week in the United States has brought the B.T.L. servers to a standstill.
Suzette Tillett, B.T.L Public Relations Manager
“Since last week Thursday we’ve been experiencing slowing down of our servers. And this is being caused by email, a worm virus. Two worm virus, an MSBLAST and a WORSCHER virus that were released last week. And what this virus does is, it seeks out a vulnerable computer and it sends mail from that person’s computer, all the people that are in your contact list or your address book, and it sends out mails to those people and from those people. So what happens is that these mails are being queued up in our servers and you would have sometimes up to thirty thousand mails at one time. So that has been causing a slow down in the mail actually being received or mails that you send.
“What our customers have been experiencing is that they weren’t being able to send and receive mails. So what we have done over the weekend is that we’ve been trying to upgrade our severs, so that we can accommodate more excessive mails. We’ve contacted our mail provider to also include something that would help us to filter these viruses, but one of the things that were asking people do is to update your anti-virus programs and sort of get your computer cleaned up. Because even if our servers are up and running, you would still experience a problem if you indeed have that virus.”
Tillett says customers can help the situation by immediately deleting messages that arrive from unfamiliar sources, or with an attachment. B.T.L technicians are working to have all the necessary filters installed by the end of next week, but the problem should start easing this week. The cost of the Sobig virus to the company has not yet been calculated, but Tillett says it is already in the thousands of dollars and still counting.
