The Lake Washington School District has found the virus in its network

Nov 30, 2012 08:49 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has been asked to help the Lake Washington School District get rid of the Goblin virus, as the infection has reportedly reached its network and affected thousands of computers.

KOMO News reports that the Goblin virus has spread to each of the district’s 50 schools, but officials are yet to determine the way the infection has managed to reach the network.

As part of the LWSD Mobile Access for Students program, middle and high school students have been allowed to take their laptops at home.

Some of the students have apparently installed unapproved games and applications and in case the data was infected with the Goblin virus, the malware automatically spread on other computers once the laptop was reconnected to the school’s network.

The district’s Lenovo netbooks are using Sophos anti-malware security tools, all of them capable to detect and remove Goblin, but a newer version of the virus could actually bypass protection.

Although additional staff has been hired to deal with the infection, the district has asked Microsoft to step in and help remove the virus, as the schools are covered though a contract with Microsoft Premier Support.

“It is a really a little nasty virus that likes networks,” district spokeswoman Kathryn Reith told the source.

“We are working very hard on containment and once you have that containment then you have a shot at taking care of things. We are going to figure out what happened here to beef up what we already have in the way of all those kinds of protections against the viruses.”

According to security company ESET, the Goblin virus is usually infecting files with .exe, .dll, .scr and .sys extensions and is spreading via removable media, shares and files selected to be burned to a CD.

Most anti-virus solutions are already capable to detect the virus, but updating virus definitions is recommended, just to make sure you’re on the safe side.