T.H.E Journal, by Dian Schaffhauser
Around Christmas 2009 the network operations manager and his IT team at the Montgomery Independent School District in Texas (about 60 miles north of Houston) noticed a dramatic slowdown in login times. "Our utilizations on [primary domain controllers and backup domain controllers] went way up. They'd be working three to four times harder than they had been a month before," recalled Thornton. Analysis of the event logs showed that malware was attempting a brute-force attack using automatically generated log-in credentials against the district's Windows 2003 and 2008 servers.