Microsoft Worms Crash Ohio Nuke Plant, MD Trains

stieglmant writes "For everyone who thought the 'blackout of 2003' was bad, how about this, according to an article at SecurityFocus, and another article at The Register, 'The Slammer worm penetrated a private computer network at Ohio's Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in January and disabled a safety monitoring system for nearly five hours.'" Russell writes "Maryland MARC Train Service was shut down most of Wednesday morning due to what sounds like the MS-Blast worm or one of its variants. The local Baltimore news reports that the cause was a signal malfunction but CSX, whose communications system runs the tracks, has an article describing the shutdown as a result of 'a worm virus similar to those that have infected the systems of other major companies and agencies in recent days'. This indicates that the network that the train signaling stations are on is not protected by firewalls, at least to block ports 135 and 444 where the DCOM vulnerability is attacked. Wow, taken to the extreme, the exploitation of their systems could have caused a train collision and injury or death to hundreds of Maryland and Virginia commuters."

Comments

Re:David-Besse Plant Problems

[Superfarstucker]

To quote the words of a famous comedian:

Speaking of potential mishaps, here's a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if two planes almost collide it's a near miss. That's crap my friend. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss.

WHAM! CRUNCH!
"Look, they nearly missed!"
"Yes, but not quite."

I used to admire Slashdot because...

[Assmasher]

...the membership and the various personnel who manage the site could be relied upon to at least be a little objective; however, in the past 2 years, the mere mention of the word Microsoft signifies evil. Of course, I don't care if people don't like Microsoft, I don't much care for them myself, but it pisses me off to see how stupid a headline the managers of this site will allow to be posted. Do you wish to be known as a *nix only website rather than a *geek website? FFS, "Microsoft worms CRASH OHIO NUKE PLANT, MD TRAINS."

Does Slashdot really want to become a sensationalist news source (ergo, not a news source)?

CowboyNeal will probably say, "heh, we didn't pick the title, we want to give people a chance to exercise those 1st amendment rights, especially opinion", well, if so, you should post everyone's submissions otherwise you are advocating a particular viewpoint (unless the same story is submitted by other people.) I know for a fact that Slashdot's managers prune articles they subjectively dislike and label them 'duplicates or redundant' even though they are not.

Hmmm...

[winchester]

I subjected this story on monday??? And someone else submits it LATER and this gets accepted?