A virus that infected and shuttered the St. Tammany Parish’s Clerk of Court’s computer system and Web site last week was contained and eliminated this weekend.

About 6:30 p.m. Saturday night, after a marathon session of forensic investigations, Clerk of Court Malise Prieto announced the system’s return.

“We are back in the saddle,” she said. The PC-based virus, the first in five years to infiltrate the system’s Norton Anti-Virus firewall, first made its presence known a week ago. About 3:18 p.m. last Monday clerks noticed dozens of software alerts popping up on their computer screens.

The message was simple: It said a virus was trying “to break in,” Malise said. Software specialists tried to stop it, but then on Tuesday it “hit us bad, really bad.”

Later that day, out of an abundance of caution, Prieto shut down the system’s 200 computers and its Web site, www.sttammanyclerk.org.

“I thought it prudent to shut things down, slow things down until we found out what we were dealing with,” Prieto said. “It was out of an abundant of caution.”

Online users were severed from the clerk’s public record database that features criminal and civil records, land records and more. About 1,000 monthly subscribers pay an additional fee to access more in-depth records.

“It made people realize how important this (record data base) was to them when they didn’t have access,” she said.

On Monday, Prieto said no data was compromised or lost.

An independent team of experts, alongside about a dozen clerk employees who “worked our butts off,” should be commended, she said. Those employees could only do so much because the parish government also runs its own firewall that scans computers of many other local political subdivisions.

“We could only do so much from our side,” she said.

On Monday, Prieto announced plans to “gear up” and buy her office’s own firewall, a cost of about $3,000, she said.

“We just need something we can control,’ she aid.