Devoted to Help Desk and Technical Support personnel and applications

Probably the worst recent virus threat is the Storm Worm Virus.  It has grown 10 times larger than any other email attack in the past two years.  On average 1 million emails cross the internet in one day, but between July 16th and August 1st researchers tracked 415 million malicious messages.  99% of these were from the Storm Worm.  

While working as an Escalation/Issue Manager on a help desk that provided service to about 40,000 users, our network became literally ambushed by a virus one morning that had only been discovered hours earlier by McAfee.  The virus froze computers all over the network.  It traveled quickly through share folders paralyzing the network. 

With minimal information, I put up a Front End Message first.  (See Part one of Crisis Management for more about Front End Messages.)  It went something like this:  

"The help desk is aware of virus activity on the network that is related to network issues nationwide.  If you suspect that your computer is affected by a virus, please continue to hold so that a help desk analyst can assist you.  Thank you for your patience."

Notice that the Front End Message was designed to keep people on the phone.  When you have Virus activity that is serious, you don’t want customers to hang up.   It was time to notify everyone else.  Initially I contacted the two groups that I knew were most likely to identify the first course of action to resolve the issue.  It was most critical to talk to the Security Team and Network Operations Center (NOC).  The Security Team was already focused on the virus.  They had researched the virus, and they were shutting down ports of computers that were infected.  (I forgave them for forgetting to notify me…)  Fortunately we had port security. The Security Team requested that customers be ask to shut down computers that showed virus activity, and the help desk should dispatch technicians to clean the machines.

The NOC had identified 23 locations that were at a virtual stand still.  When I told them we had enormous virus activity, their puzzled faces dissolved.  They could not do much to resolve the issue, but they had the knowledge they needed to solve some of the network issues.

After notifying my upper management about the next course of action, I sent out notification to the team.  First I updated the Outage Bulletin Board, then I copied the information into a quick email to the team.  I followed up by walking around which was critical, because help desk techs are often too busy to check on every email as soon as it comes in.  The email explained what help desk agents needed to do to assist the users.  See Step 1 and Step 3 for more about Crisis Management.