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Virus Knocks Out U.S. Visa Approval System
GillBates0 writes "According to this story and many others, the State Department's electronic system for checking every visa applicant for terrorist or criminal history failed worldwide late Tuesday because of a computer virus, leaving the U.S. government unable to issue visas. The virus crippled the department's Consular Lookout and Support System, known as CLASS, which contains, among others, names of at least 78,000 suspected terrorists. It was unclear which computer virus might have affected the system. But a separate message sent to embassies and consular offices late Tuesday warned that the Welchia virus had been detected in one facility. Welchia is an aggressive infection unleashed last month that exploits a software flaw in recent versions of Microsoft Windows."
Time again to post an article on The Broken Windows fallacy.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Actually, after looking at the state depts website, I found this.
Seems that when someone applies for a visa, gets checked out and denied, they get added to CLASS.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Evidently, the virus was patched/cleaned pretty quickly, and there was no real security risk, as in national security, because when the system is down, they simply do not issue visas. Most places they probably just told people to come back tomorrow.
This link is better.
Wikileaks, no DNS
They dont.
Most government facilities I've been to use Windows on desktops, and big iron unix servers in the back rooms. Big mainframes that have been there since the early 80s.
There's no way this system with close to 30 million names runs on SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL or any other mid-classed database system.
They shut off the network to make sure it was clean, because one infected terminal could potentially leak a whole lot of information to the wrong people.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
.. As long as any half-*ss kid can write 'applications' for the OS by point-and-click on Visual Basic, Windows will be the OS of choise. Too many companies are making money of cutting and pasting together apps.
It isn't the OS that counts, it's the applications that run on it. If it gets the job done, nobody will give a rats ass what OS is beneath.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
And block attachments that are prone to viruses for the love of God. pdf, yeah, it can get a virus due to acrobat .. but that's usually less broken than say, word and it's macro viruses, or microsoft lookout and it's vulnerabilities. So you'd at least filter all the extensions for attachments that aren't safe..
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
The English visa is a an import of the 19th century French word le vise, which derives from the Latin plural past participle of videre to see. In Latin, visa roughly translates to "things seen".
Crudely, a visa indicates that the bearer's documents have been seen by the issuing country. As the issuance of a visa requires the examination of several papers and databases, visa is always plural. Moreover, as the French treat it as a singular form, and English imported it from the French, the Latin is of little consequence here.
Sources: TF Hoad, ed, Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford:Oxford University Press,1986)
3.) Use anti-virus software and update the definitions often
Define "often", please. It could be once a month, once a quarter. I'm sure they have change control plans.
I've been using Norton Corporate Edition on my networks quite successfully for some time now. A server is config'd to be the update server and all the clients are managed from it. You can push updates to all the clients either manually or schedule them to update automatically. You can even force clients that come on the network to accept an AV client install package before they are allowed to participate.
I also would recommend putting the laptops on a separate node and firewalling them off from the rest.
No, it's just that it's easier to assume that you are smarter than them and assume you know their network and systems.
Not necessarily. Whenever you get into larger bureaucracies, there's always a level of friction with respect to implementing IT changes/updates. Any number of things could be causing it. It could be clueless, IT staff used to screwing the pooch in gov't service, it could be difficulties in getting anything approved, it could simply be toxic office politics. It could be little dictators building mini-kingdoms for themselves...refusing to implement any suggestions because THEY didn't come up with it (I've seen that one many times!). I don't think it's the nature of their networks and systems that's the issue here at all, after all it's a Windows virus/worm that took them out. How unusual is that?
You're using her as bait, Master!