The Melissa computer virus wreaked havoc in computers throughout the world last week, including those of faculty and administrators at Iowa State.

The staff of ISU’s Administrative Data Processing Center (ADP) worked many hours March 27-28 to combat the virus, which targeted networked personal computers.

David L. Smith, 30, a computer programmer in New Jersey, was arrested Thursday night for allegedly creating the Melissa virus, according to ABC news.

Smith faces charges including interruption of public communications and conspiracy and theft of computer service, with a maximum penalty of 40 years in prison and a $480,000 fine.

John McCarroll, director of University Relations, said Thursday that the ADP had dealt with 1,600 instances of viruses since March 26.

“The ADP first got the call about [the virus] Friday afternoon,” he said. “Within a couple of hours, the ADP had put out a warning electronically to people throughout the university.”

Jeff Balvanz, systems analyst at the Computation Center, said the virus affected mostly departmental computers, but a few student computers were affected.

To clean the virus from ISU’s computer systems, McCarroll said the university installed anti-virus software.

Jim Davis, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-coordinator of the Information Systems Security Lab, said the Melissa virus is unique because it copies and sends itself through e-mail.

“Most don’t spread this way,” Davis said. “The idea of replicating itself through e-mail is a new wrinkle to it.”

He said the code in the virus takes 50 e-mail addresses from the infected computer’s e-mail address books and sends copies of itself to them.

“A single virus can completely clog network connections,” he said.

The Melissa virus gains control of the computer system through programs embedded in e-mail attachments, Davis said. These programs, or macros, are executed when the message is opened in Microsoft Word and Excel.

“A virus needs to gain control of your computer in order to spread, to infect other computers,” he said. “By the time you see the message on the screen, it’s already happened.”

It is called the Melissa virus because the name Melissa was found in it, Balvanz said.

Balvanz said the Melissa virus is not as malicious as other viruses because it doesn’t delete documents.

Davis said computer users can defend themselves from the virus by opting to disable the use of macros in Word and Excel.

“The best thing is prevention,” Balvanz said.

To prevent getting the virus, Balvanz said to go under the “Tools” bar of Word or Excel, and then to “Options.” A dialog box will appear, and under the “General” tab will be an option to check for viruses. It will then scan documents to determine if viruses are present, he said.

However, Davis said the virus may mutate in the future, and disabling macros won’t work in stopping virus transmission.

“Someone [might] tweak it a little bit so that it doesn’t use e-mail,” he said.

In the near future, computer virus authors could find other ways to transmit viruses, Davis said.

“The idea of disabling macros will no longer work for the next generation of the Melissa virus,” he said.

The virus has affected more administrative computers than faculty computers, McCarroll said.

“Part of this has to do with the e-mail system that a lot of us in administration use called Microsoft Outlook [Express], which was a target for this particular virus,” he said.

The virus hasn’t caused any permanent damage, McCarroll said, but “it’s a reminder that these things can happen.”

Franklin Trumpy, technical support manager at Ames Net, 120 Kellogg Ave., said Melissa is not as bad as other viruses because it is restricted to the Outlook Express e-mail program.

“It’s generally less damaging than others,” he said. People think of viruses as destroying their documents, but the ‘Melissa’ virus just reproduces itself in a document, he said.

Trumpy said infected e-mail must have attachments, such as a document or picture, in order for it to infect a computer.

“If you’re not expecting that kind of document from someone, don’t open it,” he said.

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Special to the Daily writer Laura Engelson contributed to this report.