Helping students help themselves: malware removal

Viruses, spyware, and worms have become a growing problem for academic institutions in the past few years, with Bethel being no exception. Since 2003, our residential network has been plagued multiple times with large-scale virus outbreaks, causing outages and headaches for our users.Our initial plan for handling infected computers was to quarantine them and permit users to access only security-related web sites to assist them in cleaning their infected PC. When this plan failed due to the outages, we began creating security CDs containing anti-virus and spyware software. This solution worked well temporarily, however it was not designed to be a long-term solution. Our final solution is a product of combining these previous attempts to create a long-term solution that is easy for our users and has very little administrative overhead.We created a Linux-based kiosk that allows students to easily create security CDs that provide resources to help them properly clean their system. The kiosk operates with a web-based interface that instructs the user through the entire process. All they are required to do is insert a CD and the kiosk automatically loads the necessary software to the CD.This paper explores our attempts at remedying the issue of infected student computers. It explains how our implementation of a Security CD Creation Kiosk has resolved our failures of the past and provided an easy and effective solution for our users.