It’s not everyday that a university spams it’s students about something other than college! Emory University took this to a whole another level. Called the “Windows 7 Incident“, the university sent out recovery images to everyone. I mean everyone. Every laptop, desktop and even server running on Windows 7 in the network received this. The recovery request starts out with a re-partition/reformat set of tasks and goes on to take over your entire system and wipe in clean.
Ironically, once the faculty discovered this mishap they went to shut off the server, but by the time they did, the server itself was re-partitioned and reformatted. However immediate action was taken and the servers are being worked on to regain their original state.
UPDATE: 12 PM, May 14, 2014
By now you have probably seen many support staff and “deputies” dispatched to your locations to restore your Windows computers to an operational state. We expect to have most if not all PCs imaged by COB today. It is important to note that the systems will have a Windows 7 operating system and key components such as Microsoft Office, Flash, Firefox, iTunes, Adobe Reader, and McAfee Anti-Virus. Specialized applications such as Visio, Project, Adobe applications, etc will be installed separately. We are working on restoring the Software Portal to all users so that you may utilize self-service to re-install your missing applications. We hope to have this portal available to you with instructions by COB today or tomorrow morning at the latest. For those not comfortable with performing the self-installs, you may choose to open a support ticket with the list of applications that are missing from your computer. Thank you for your patience while we restore your system and services. It is also important to mention that many configuration settings like printers, drive mappings, etc are set automatically using group policies. If you are experiencing any issues with your PC after it is re-imaged, please be sure to reboot first, which may solve your problems. If issues still exist, please open a support ticket and we will get to you as quickly as possible.
Luckily the university set up a ticketing system and almost all computers on campus were factory reset to working condition Before the main server was fixed, individual systems were reset manually. But now the servers are up and running, and it’s possible to reset individual systems with the click of a button.
This is why I’m writing this from a Mac, where the only known virus would require you to manually install it! 😉