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Windows Virus Takes Out Gov't Agencies in MD, PA

Posted by michael on from the no-great-loss dept.

Zolzar writes "Looks like the Md. State Motor Vehicles Administration is the first government agency reporting a failure of their systems due to the recent virus." This is a more specific story about the outage. And the city of Philadelphia has suffered as well.

4 of 984 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Yes by molarmass192 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Let me get this straight, patient monitoring systems are plugged into the same LAN in which doctors, admins, and what-not are free to plug in their laptops? I don't work in a hospital but even we have DMZ subnets for more sensitive parts of our network. I can't (or rather don't want to) believe that hospitals don't segment their networks the same way.

    --

    Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
  2. Re:Yes by Cat_Byte · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've been knocking on doors for a job since I was laid off on December 24th. It seems most of the hospitals have contracted out their IT positions rather than have them in-house.

    Hey when I was a contractor I walked in, did what they asked me to do, then went on to the next job site. I didn't go around asking if they had seperate LANs for sensitive equipment because...well...I was paid salary and wanted to go home after my 10 hr day. I'm sure the current contractors feel the same way.

    Being a local sysadmin/network admin is different. It's your baby, you get the call at 3am when things go bad, you make sure that doesn't happen. Too bad employers don't see that and I bet you this one still doesn't see it that way.

    --
    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
  3. Speaking of Money by MacFury · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Every once in awhile I hear about companies forecasting how much money will be lost due to lost productivity and downtime of infected computers.

    Has anyone compiled a list to see something like how much M$ has cost the world due to insecure software?

    I would guess it's a couple billion dollars by now. Why does no one care?

  4. Re:Yes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hahaha... you have faith.

    Back in the day, I was called to a hospital in the middle of nowhere that stored everything (patient records, accounting, etc) on a single IBM AIX box.

    Someone who was supposed to be an admin blasted the /etc filesystem and thought unplugging the machine would fix it. (So all the databases were f-ed up too)

    The last backup had been made approximately 3 years before and the system had been upgraded several times. Nobody knew what version the system was actually on, and the one contractor who did was climbing a mountain somewhere. (This is happening at 2AM saturday) It was also in "Trusted" mode.

    To make a long story short, we eventually got in and got everything up on Sunday night.

    Lesson #5675: Never underestimate the incompetence of hostpital IT staff. (Particularly small hospitals).