A vicious virus hit thousands of state computers without any warning last Tuesday.

"You couldn't log onto the Internet and you couldn't log on to the network," said James McCurtis of the Michigan Department of Community Health.

"We had a virus on the network and we had machines that were trying to contact foreign websites," said Dan Lohrmann of the Michigan Department of Information Technology.

The goal of the virus was to steal information off computers and ship it overseas, The Michigan Department of Community Health and the Michigan Department of Civil Rights were the virus victims, before the state's Information Technology Department set out to secure the system.

"It was a zero day virus, which means there was no fix for it right away, and that's why it took us so long to recover from it," Lohrmann said.

It took about three days to detect and clean the virus, in the mean time the Community Health Department experienced delays of up to one hour for delivering public services.

"birth certificates and death certificates, when people came here to get either a death or a birth certificate, we were able to take their information in a secure fashion over to another building," McCurtis said.

Nearly 1500 computers were effected at the Michigan Department of Community Health, and state technology officials say if the virus hadn't been caught right away, it could have spread to even more departments.

"We were able to detect this within seconds and block the effected network, had we not done that this could have spread to thousands more," Lohrmanns said.

"We were relieved greatly because we deal with a lot of sensitive information here at the Department of Community Health," McCurtis said.