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."

Comments

Re:Windows Means Work

[Morosoph]

Time again to post an article on The Broken Windows fallacy.

Re:78.000 suspected terrorists?

[stratjakt]

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.

My sister works there.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Windows Means Work

[Morosoph]

This link is better.

Re:microsoft

[stratjakt]

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.