Covenant News

Covenant Internet Email Service Restored

CHICAGO, IL (August 28, 2002) - Internet email service is once again functioning normally for administrative offices of the Evangelical Covenant Church, as well as three other major Covenant institutions - Covenant Ministries of Benevolence offices, Covenant Retirement Communities (CRC) and Covenant Trust Company.

Service was interrupted around 8:45 a.m. last Friday after anti-virus software malfunctioned on the computer server that is maintained at CRC offices and supports email messaging for all of the affected Covenant entities.

"It does appear that some email is lost," said Greg Neumarke, ECC computer network administrator. "The amount of lost email is different for each organization. For Covenant offices, email that arrived here between 8:45 a.m. Friday morning and about 9 a.m. Tuesday morning either bounced back to the sender or was lost." Email service was restored at 9 a.m. yesterday.

Hampering service restoration efforts was an unusually high volume of email (10,000 messages per day) sent by computers infected with the Klez virus, Neumarke observed. "Surprisingly, it is turning out that most of those thousands of Klez virus emails were sent by just a half-dozen computers, mainly on high-speed lines and apparently left on 24 hours a day," he said. "We notified those people's internet service providers in cases where we identified the infected computers."

New hardware and software is being installed that will operate a newer operating system with newer firewall and anti-virus software. It is possible that periodic interruptions of email service to these Covenant entities may occur during the next few days.

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